The Chrome browser for both Mac and Linux is coming. In fact, the first version is being released by Google this weekend. The problem is that it’s just a developer version, the first stage to a full release, which remains several tantalizing months away.
In a blog posting product managers Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg wrote:
“In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.”
“How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.”
“Meanwhile, we’ll get back to trying to get Google Chrome on these platforms stable enough for a beta release as soon as possible!”
A developer version comes first, to sort out most of the bugs, followed by beta testing, and then a final full release.