Beta di Chrome 4, disponibile da scaricare

Google ha rilasciato la prima Beta pubblica di Chrome 4. Ad annunciarlo sul Google Chrome Blog, Idan Avraham e Anton Muhin, Software Engineers a Mountain View.
Chrome 4 Beta porta con sé un aumento delle prestazioni del 30% rispetto all’attuale versione stabile del browser, la 3.0.195.27, e del 400% rispetto alla prima release stabile. Le misurazioni sono state effettuate tramite i Mozilla Dromaeo DOM Core Tests.
L’altra novità di rilievo riguarda la possibilità di sincronizzare i bookmarks su più computer.
Sono stati gli stessi utenti di Chrome, spiegano Avraham e Muhin, a
richiedere questa feature. Con la prima Beta pubblica di Chrome 4 sarà
effettivamente possibile sincronizzare i preferiti su più PC, senza la
necessità di inserirli manualmente ogni volta che si utilizza una macchina diversa. Dopo aver attivato Google Chrome bookmark sync su ogni computer, sottolinea il post, qualsiasi cambiamenti apportato al menu preferiti apparirà in pochi secondi su tutte le macchine sincronizzate.
Mentre a Mountain View lo sviluppo di Chrome prosegue senza sosta,
il browser di BigG sembra tallonare da vicino Safari di Apple. Chrome,
secondo i dati di Net Applications
relativi a settembre, ha raggiunto un market share del 3,58%, mentre il
browser di Cupertino si attesta a quota 4,42%. Rispetto al settembre
del 2008, Chrome è cresciuto dello 0,41%. Un trend che, se confermato,
porterebbe il browser di Google a superare Safari nei primi mesi del
2010. Leader del mercato resta Internet Explorer, che però è sceso
sotto quota 65%, mentre Firefox ha superato il 24% di market share.

Changelog:

The Dev channel has been updated to 4.0.237.0 for all platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux). The focus on this release has been feature polish, stability improvement, and extensions work.

Mac
Significant bookmark bar improvements.
Linux
[r29163, r29299] Audio playing improvements in video/audio tags. (Issues: 23974, 20945, 17703)
[r29261] Fix international keyboard handling (alt-gr, ctrl+f). (Issues: 10846, 2215, 21471)
[r29657] ~ now works in the Omnibox to expand to home directories. (Issue: 18200)
[r29857] Fix conflicts between accelerator keys and HTML DOM accesskeys. (Issue: 21624)
[r29903] Inactive pinned tabs on linux throb when the title changes. (Issue: 25308)
Text drawn over rounded corners (including buttons) is no longer blurry. This affected a variety of sites, including Google Calendar and Google Reader.
As an experiment, we´ve changed the way clicking in the omnibox works. Leave a comment on the bug if it bothers you.

Extensions
Lots of work to polish and stabilize the browser and page action APIs:
[r29556] Add badge text color API. Also change color APIs from ARGB to RGBA (breaking change, sorry!) (Issues: 24635, 24644, 25215)
[r29152, r29785] Browser actions (buttons, popups) are now implemented. (Issue: 23882, 23897)
[r29997] Add support for tab-specific state to browser actions. Also, fix the bug where only the first call to setIcon() works. (Issues: 24669,24472)
[r30346] Constrain browser action popups to a min/max size. Also fix some glitches in popup sizing. (Issue 25214)
[r30499] Use a better signature for the new page actions API (chrome.pageAction.* instead of chrome.pageActions.*). This is technically a breaking change, but hopefully not too many people had gotten around to using the new API yet. (Issue 25833)
[r29665] Remove toolstrips on linux. They were causing lots of crashes and are going away soon anyway. (Issue 25106)
[r29911] Add chrome.extension.sendRequest() -- a simpler way to do content script messaging. (Issue 23865)
[r30341] Add new event chrome.tabs.onStatusChange. This makes the common case of wanting to know when tabs load much easier. (Issue 21729)
Other miscellaneous cleanup:
[r29498] Correctly handle reloading in the task manager (Issue 18693)
[r29555] Fix bug where content scripts did not always apply to first page load (Issue 11547)
[r29714, r29922, r29935, r30219] Various cleanup for the extension management page (Issues 12119, 25509, 25471)
[r30091] Improve install UI on mac (Issue 19654)
[r30312] Filter out hidden files when loading and packing extensions (Issue 23004)
[r30326] Copy chrome.extension.getTabContentses() to chrome.extension.getExtensionTabs(). Nobody liked the old name. (Issue 21433)
[r30384] Use the puzzle piece as the default extension icon. (Issue 25906)
[r30481] Hide the theme install bubble a little earlier. It was overlapping with the install dialog on linux. (Issue 26130)

Known Issues:
[r26861] - Autocomplete/ select box values are not being correctly populated in Linux. As a work around you can use the up/down arrow keys to view the current selection.
[r26600] - Task bar icon in Windows does not update/ display correctly.