Google Chrome races ahead in Windows, lags behind on Mac and Linux

Google introduced its Chrome web browser around a year ago, so it's worth taking a quick look at what is happening with the browser. It hasn't been as successful as Google probably hoped and its share of the web browser market has only just risen above 2% according to sources like Wikipedia. The logs for this web site actually put it slightly under 2%, but the figures are so small it's hardly worth arguing about. It's pretty poor for such a giant of a company with the resources that Google has.

Chrome was very fast at executing JavaScript, which is important these days because it's so frequently used, but otherwise had a poor feature set when it was launched. It is steadily improving though and maybe this time next year it will be an OK web browser. It certainly needs more features and not just extra speed.

The latest beta version was released on 5th August and it is claimed to be 30% faster than the current stable release. Fortunately, the improvements aren't all about the speed and some new features have been added and old ones tweaked too. It's not worth listing them all here, but to find out what's new in the latest beta of Chrome you should read the Google Chrome Blog.

So development of the Windows version of Chrome is racing ahead, but the linux and Apple Mac versions haven't even been released yet. It seems like development is taking place at a snail's pace. Why? Is it really so difficult to write software for the Mac and linux?

For those that are interested though, you can get betas of the linux and Apple Mac OS X versions here. (Most Google stuff is beta, but these are even more unfinished/unstable than usual.)