Chrome for Mac to come in a tad underweight…

I can’t wait for Google Chrome on Mac. Almost since day 1, it replaced Firefox as my main Windows browser and over the last couple of weeks each build release has inched closer and closer to perfection. Granted, I use perfection loosely, merely using it to describe a “finished”, stable product. While we can expect a Chrome 4 for Mac of some sort in the next couple of weeks, it will be far from perfect, finished, or full featured. Features such as bookmark manager, mutli-touch gestures, gears, app mode, task manager, and several more have been pushed back to Chrome Milestone 5. Some features such as Gears are being completely left out with Google instead favoring HTML5 tools and services. Am I harping on Chrome? Maybe a little. While I use it on my Mac now and enjoy it thoroughly, many people will find the missing features a sore point and reason to wait for the next major release. I’ll be honest, most of the features mentioned above aren’t that big of a deal to me. Still, after looking at everything Chrome for Mac won’t do out of the box means it is an extremely bare bones browser in the beginning. What do you think: Should Google have waited and added a few more features, sacrificing several more weeks or months delay? Or is it Chrome for Mac FTW!! — ?

TechCrunch

Finally a date: Chrome beta for Mac coming mid-December!

Those who frequent not only Gadgetsteria but many other tech blogs, with a feed reader list in the triple digits, don’t sit back and wait for even official beta products. No sir/mam. As soon as a developer build, alpha, or some other unofficial “you-probably-shouldn’t-use-this-yet-but-you-will-anyway” build becomes available, we jump on it. What can I say, if you’re like me, you love living life on the edge. Digital edge that is. I’ve been keeping close to the Mac Chrome beta for many, many weeks and have watched it mature from an unusable proof of concept to a now nearly fully functioning browser. Mind you it’s still a decent ways away from release as performance isn’t nearly as fast the windows counter parts. And what’s the point of releasing a “light weight” browser if it isn’t very “lite” on it’s feet?

So how do we know that Chrome for Mac is set to launch (as a beta) in mid-December? It all has to do with browser actions. Currently the Windows and Linux versions are the only versions that support said feature. Wipe the building tears from your eyes and don’t turn around heading for home just yet. Nick Baum, Google Chrome’s Product Manager had this to say in regards to browser extensions and delaying the Mac version so that it wasn’t the lone duck, sitting between it’s two sister browsers lacking the aforementioned feature.

We realize this means dropping Mac support for a couple of weeks, but we already have people working on that,” Baum said. “If you prioritize the Windows and Linux versions, we’ll bring you cross-platform parity as soon as we can!

So could it be ready now? More than likely if you get a developer or nightly build now, you’re pretty close to the final beta product. But I’m a stickler for having the latest numbers and even a .0.0.1 change will somehow seem all that much better in my mind. December isn’t far at all. Excited yet?

Cnet