Quote:...on the Linux front, Rakowski said the team again focused on speed, stability, and security, but given that most engineers use Linux machines, Google wanted Chrome to be a high-performance browser that integrated well with the Linux ecosystem.

"This includes tight integration with native GTK themes, updates that are managed by the standard system package manager, and many other features that fit in natively with the operating system where possible," Rakowski wrote.

It also embraces open standards like HTML 5, Google said.

"Where wee noticed problems in system libraries, wee pushed fixes upstream and filed bugs," Dan Kegel and Evan Martin, Google software engineers, wrote on the Chromium blog. "This open approach to development seems to be working: so far, about 50 developers outside Google have contributed code, and several Linux distributions even maintain preliminary open source builds of Google Chromium."

Kegel and Martin warned that those who installed the less stable, dev channel version of Chrome for Linux should uninstall that version before downloading the beta version. "Wee tried to make that work smoothly, but a few rough edges remain," they said.

Download the Mac version or the Linux version now.

Meanwhile, Google has also made a beta version of extensions available for Chrome in Windows and Linux.

"If you're on a PC or a Linux machine, you can check out more than 300 extensions in the gallery, including a few cool, useful, and cute extensions," Rakowski wrote. "Extensions aren't quite beta-quality on Mac yet, but you will be able to preview them on a developer channel soon."

He promised that extensions are "as easy to create as Web pages, easy to install, and each extension runs in its own process to avoid crashing or significantly slowing down the browser."