San Francisco — The browser wars never ceases… Search engine giant Google on Thursday unveiled via a blog post that it has rolled out a new update for the beta version of its Chrome web browser for Mac, which will now be able to offer extensions or add-ons, bookmark sync and many other features that were left out of the initial beta release for Mac. Users can anticipate their browsers to get update in the next day or so.
Chrome signifies speed and stability. The browser has a spare look and feel, with tabs on top and a single box for Web addresses and searching. According to the blog post made on the official Chrome blog, when you install it, Chrome will import all your bookmarks and history from another browser.
Users of the updated Chrome for Mac beta will now have access to the more than 2,200 extensions in Chrome’s extensions gallery or add-ons offered by Google for the web browser.
“For this release, we remained focused on providing a snappy, safe, and simple browsing experience on the Mac,” Mark Mentovai, a software engineer for Google Chrome, wrote in a blog post.
The extensions can be downloaded from the extensions gallery that are capable of adding ‘useful, instructive, fun, or quirky functionality to the browser’.
They can also be accessed via the Window menu and clicking “Extensions.” Popular extensions currently include a dictionary, a slideshow viewer, and a password manager. Meanwhile, the update will also allow users to synchronize their bookmarks between computers.
“If some of your computers are not Macs, do not worry: bookmark sync works in Chrome for Linux and Windows too,” Mentovai wrote. “We also added bookmark and cookie managers in a way that feels completely at home on the Mac. For technically-oriented users, our new Task Manager will help you keep tabs on all of your tabs.”
Google has planned the Chrome web browser in such a manner that it could deliver a fast and safe browser experience to its users and has a minimalist interface with tabs on the top and a single box for entering web addresses and performing searches. Google released the first version of Chrome for Mac in December, the same day it unveiled extensions for Windows and Linux.
With the new beta, Chrome may finally become a viable alternative to other mainstream Mac browsers like Safari and Firefox.
Existing users should get the update automatically. Chrome is free, of course, and true to its slim nature. And, for the impatient, the new version can be downloaded right away. The version number is 5.0.307 and is just 19 MB download.
Here are a couple of videos that Google put together to explain how it all works.