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Google released an update for Chrome to fix compatibility problems with Snow Leopard on Monday, which along with other fixes shows the gradually maturing state of the Mac OS X version of the browser.

Chrome 4.0.203.4 for the Mac is only a couple notches up the version ladder than the version 4.0.203.2 it replaces, but there are some significant changes in the developer-preview software. For Snow Leopard compatibility, programmers fixed a garbled text bug, said Jonathan Conradt, a Chrome engineering program manager, in a blog post Monday.

Google began Chrome on Windows but has been gradually moving it to Linux and Mac OS X. Those versions so far are still only developer-preview incarnations not ready for prime time yet, though I find myself gradually slipping over to Chrome on my Mac system now that it's getting mature enough for me. I suspect a beta version isn't far off.

Google is fleshing out some basic features, though. One user-interface tweak enables support for command- and shift-clicking.

Another feature coming to the Mac is support for the tab-to-search feature in the omnibox. That lets you perform a site search directly from the address bar by typing a URL, for example news.cnet.com, then the tab key, then search terms.

Tab-to-search also works with Amazon, Google, Google News, and Yahoo, The New York Times, but not Bing yet. I search a lot, and this saves me one step and waiting for a page to load just so I can click in its search bar.

The tab-to-search feature has arrived on Chrome for Mac OS X, too.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The most annoying issue I've found--and let me know if I'm missing something obvious here--is that I lose the file-upload dialog box while using Gmail with Chrome on Mac OS X if I switch away from the application while halfway through. If I don't attach a file immediately, that tab's instance of Gmail becomes useless because I can't get back to it.

Performance still is an issue with the Mac version, though. I was pleased to see some work on new-tab creation speed, with programmer Mark Mentovai using various changes to work the time from 1-3 seconds down to a fifth of a second.

Google is working hard to spread Chrome, though it has small market share at present. It's now installed as the default browser on some Sony laptops, as Endgadget noticed in July with the Vaio NW, and I heard about earlier in August.

Google has been advertising the browser as well and is at work making it the foundation of its Chrome OS.

An Apple manager has become a co-chairman of the group standardizing HTML, giving the company a higher-profile role in a crucial time for development of the language used to build Web pages.

The World Wide Web Consortium's HTML Working Group had been led by IBM's Sam Ruby and Microsoft's Chris Wilson. Wilson has stepped down and is being replaced by two others, Paul Cotton, who manages Microsoft's Web services standards team, and Maciej Stachowiak, who manages Apple's WebKit WebApps team, according to an e-mail announcement by W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee.

"Why three co-Chairs?" Berners-Lee asked in the note. "Clearly, there is a lot of work to do. Sam, Paul, and Maciej bring particular skills to the job (whether it is Maciej's experience with WebKit or Paul's with Working Group processes)."

Indeed, the two new co-chairs arrive during a crucial time. The W3C stopped developing HTML with version 4.01 in 1999, focusing instead on a very different standard called XHTML 2.0 that ultimately met its official demise in July. Browser makers, meanwhile, went their own way with a group called WHATWG, short for Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group.

WHATWG's work ultimately grew into HTML 5 as the W3C embraced HyperText Markup Language once again. It's got a number of features to make the Web a better foundation not just for static Web pages but also for more interactive Web applications. For example, one Web storage lets Web-based applications store data on a computer, helping Web applications work even when a network connection isn't available.

The standardization process is complicated, though, with a complex back-and-forth between the standards group and browser makers trying new features on their own.

Meanwhile, Microsoft only began HTML 5 discussion in earnest earlier this month.

And Aaron Boodman, a programmer involved with Google's Chrome browser, suggested on the HTML 5 mailing list, "I would like to propose that we get rid of the concepts of 'versions' altogether from HTML. In reality, nobody supports all of HTML 5...Instead of insisting that a particular version of HTML is a monolithic unit that must be implemented in its entirety, we could have each feature (or logical group of features) spun off into its own small spec."

Apple's Safari 4 Web browser was downloaded more than 11 million times in the first three days of release, the company said Friday.

And more than 6 million of the downloads came from Windows users.

Safari's Top Sites feature.

(Credit: Apple)

Since Safari 4's public beta release in February, Apple has touted the browser as the fastest in the world, when compared with other popular browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer 8.

According to Apple, Safari 4 tops IE 8 and Firefox by three times or more when loading HTML Web pages. With its Nitro JavaScript engine, the company claims, Safari executes JavaScript almost eight times as fast as IE 8 and more than four times as fast as Firefox.

Based on the open-source Webkit browser engine, Safari includes HTML 5 support for offline technologies and is the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project's Acid3 test.

Safari includes several enhancements, such as Top Sites, the ability to search history, Google Suggest, and Full Page Zoom, to make browsing the Web a bit easier.

Safari is free for download for both Mac and Windows users.

Updated 8:53 p.m. with download links and further details and 9:47 p.m. with hands-on testing results.

Google released Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux Thursday--but only in rough developer preview versions that the company warns are works in progress.

"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," Google product managers Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg said in a blog post, evidently trying to employ a little reverse psychology. "Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software."

Until now, Google's open-source browser has been a Windows-only product, and some Mac and Linux users have been clamoring for their own version. Google coders have been working to rebuild some Chrome components, such as its graphical interface and its sandbox that isolates different processes from each other, to move beyond just Windows.

Google offers three versions of Chrome: stable, beta, and developer preview. The Mac OS X and Linux versions fall into this last, category, the most buggy and least tested and complete.

Chrome for Mac OS X sports the same new-tab interface as the Windows version. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The Flash plug-in won't work, for example, so forget watching YouTube videos. Printing or bookmark management aren't implemented yet. And privacy controls aren't fully baked. Google said there are more than 400 bugs that need to be stomped.

Even though only released for the experimental crowd, the new versions are a big step forward for the browser. First, the versions will plug into Google's auto-update service that automatically downloads new versions. Second, the products bear the Google Chrome brand, not just the Chromium label of the only incarnations available until now. And third, a much larger audience will be helping Google debug the code through automated crash reports of the new versions.

Not everyone can try the Mac and Linux versions, though. Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya said the Linux version is supported only the Debian and Ubuntu incarnations of Linux, and the Mac OS X version only works on Intel-based Macs.

I gave the Mac OS X version a 40-minute whirl and was delighted to find one of my favorite Windows features--fast launch. Pages loaded reasonably quickly, too, though a few times the browser seemed to hang while loading one.

Chrome has edged up to 1.8 percent of the browser market--small but good enough for fourth place.

(Credit: Net Applications)

The only pages that didn't work for me were Yahoo Mail, which told me I had an unsupported browser, and those that required Flash. But a number of complicated JavaScript-based sites, including Gmail, Flickr Organizr, and Google Docs, had no troubles.

The animation around the tabs is pleasing, but also helps your mind grasp what's going on. A new tab rises up from the window frame. When you close a tab, the adjacent ones slide over to fill the gap. The active tab is lighter, though the other tabs are not as relatively dark as in an earlier build that I tried.

I experienced what I thought was one crash I feared brought down my machine, but after about 15 seconds the browser and machine became responsive again as if nothing had happened.

I was pleased to see the three-finger left or right swipe work to page backward and forward. However, some keyboard shortcuts were flaky--or perhaps I just have to learn new ones.

Google isn't saying when the new versions will make it to beta status, much less stable. "It's unclear. This is a first step," Bencuya said.

After years of near-dormancy when Microsoft's Internet Explorer ruled the roost, the browser world again is on fire, fueled by competition and a new generation of more interactive Web applications. Mozilla is on the cusp of releasing Firefox 3.5, as is Apple with Safari 4 for both Windows and Mac OS X. Opera 10 is in beta, and even battleship Microsoft is slowly starting to speed up with the weeks-old Internet Explorer 8.

The Mac OS X version, 3.0.182.5, is close to the latest Windows developer preview, 3.0.183.1.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

According to Net Applications statistics, Internet Explorer remains the king of the heap, with 65.5 percent market share in May 2009. Firefox has 22.5 percent, Safari 8.4, and Chrome has edged up to 1.8 percent since its launch in September.

All this variety means Web developers have to test their sites to make sure they work with more versions. Because Chrome uses the WebKit engine for interpreting and displaying Web page coding, the same engine Safari uses, Google argues that Chrome should be similar. But Chrome uses a different engine for JavaScript called V8, and Web-based JavaScript instructions are at the heart of much of the present proliferation of elaborate Web pages and applications.

The browser challengers argue that having multiple browsers on the market means that Web programmers will aim more for supporting standards such as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JavaScript. And indeed, Microsoft made a standards mode the default for IE 8. However, varying interpretations of standard and varying degrees of support complicate the matter, and a large number of people haven't upgraded from IE 6, much less IE 7.

Google's latest version of Chrome has claimed the lead in my JavaScript speed tests, but Apple's new Safari 4 beta is the first browser to challenge it on Google's own performance benchmark.

JavaScript is a programming language that powers not just innumerable ordinary Web sites, but also many Web-based applications such as Google Docs. With the computing industry's major push to cloud computing, Web application performance is increasingly important, and there's a race on to see who's got the best JavaScript engine. JavaScript engines even have become a named feature, with Chrome's V8, Firefox's TraceMonkey, Opera's Futhark and upcoming Carakan, and now the Safari's newly branded Nitro, which is Apple's version of WebKit's Squirrelfish.

On the SunSpider test, the new Safari 4 beta scored third place.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

With Safari 3, I admired Apple's chutzpah for bringing its browser to Windows. With the new Safari 4 beta, I'm actually starting to admire the browser, too.

A big user interface overhaul makes Safari look polished rather than clunky on Windows, builds in better search abilities, and makes good use of the fact that people often visit the same sites over and over.

However, the lack of something like the extensions architecture that Firefox pioneered still means Safari 4 (download for Windows and Mac OS X) is better only than Safari 3, not the competition.

Google is coming a bit closer to releasing a working version of its Chrome browser for Mac.

Programmers for the company had been building an engine that could render Web pages, but it only ran within a simple framework called the test shell. Now they've begun hooking up the renderer to a full-fledged browser, which among other things can handle multiple tasks at the same time. That's key for a real application, especially one such as Chrome that isolates each browser tab into its own computing process.

The result of the work: a screenshot of Chrome running on Mac OS X posted to the Chromium developer mailing list. "Now we can call it Chrome!" crowed programmer Avi Drissman wrote.

Granted, it's a view of Chrome failing to properly show a Web page, but it's a step in the functional direction. Google has set a deadline of shipping Chrome for the Mac and Linux by end of June.

It may not look good, but this screenshot actually marks progress in getting Chrome to run on the Mac. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Avi Drissman/Google)

Moving Chrome from its initial incarnation as a Windows application to Mac OS X and Linux hasn't been easy. Ben Goodger, a Firefox programmer who now leads Chrome's interface work, griped about the difficult balance between preserving Chrome software across multiple operating systems while coping with the different abilities of each.

Google chose to split some of the Chrome interface into a Mac OS X-specific incarnation, despite the maintenance difficulties that imposes, but the choice isn't as easy when wrestling with Linux's interface, he said in a January message.

Goodger said that after some teeth-gnashing, Google eventually decided to create the Linux version of Chrome using the GTK package of graphical interface components used with the GNOME user interface.

"My initial thought was that a Windows-clone would be acceptable on Linux provided the performance of the app itself was outstanding, given the general reluctance of some of the team working on Linux towards UI (user interface). But they stood up and made their case for a GTK UI," Goodger said in a February 4 message, "and...that's what we've decided to do."

We're guessing that they won't surpass iBeer in popularity any time soon, but this is big news for the App Store: Apple has quietly started allowing Web browser applications in.

According to MacRumors, a small bunch of browser apps were recently let into the App Store. They include the free Edge Browser, the historyless Incognito ($1.99), the tabbed WebMate ($0.99), and something called Shaking Web ($1.99) that attempts to make Web sites easier to read.

Previously, Apple had not approved third-party browsers for the App Store; its own Safari browser is preinstalled on the iPhone. Other browsers weren't allowed, citing "duplicating functionality."

The browser apps currently in the App Store all have some kind of quirk that sets them apart from standard browsers, ranging from a slant in design (Edge) to one in privacy (Incognito). They're all built using Safari as a base too. So it's not yet clear whether Apple will open the gates to iPhone versions of completely separate third-party browsers, such as Firefox or Opera.

The rollout of the iPhone 3G has seen a large increase in the iPhone's global Web share, according to figures released Monday.

The figures, collected by Web analytics company Net Applications, show that in June 2008, before the launch of the iPhone 3G, the iPhone had 0.16 percent share of the operating system market, as measured by OS detection during Web browsing; and in July, it had 0.19 percent.

(Credit: Apple )

However, as of September 1, the iPhone had 0.3 percent of global market share, an increase of 58 percent in one month. According to Net Applications, this was due to the July launch of the iPhone 3G.

"The release of the iPhone 3G has brought large gains in Web-browsing share," said a Net Applications report. "Prior to the launch, iPhone usage share had leveled off, but has since resumed its upward trend."

In the operating system market, Microsoft Windows has had dominance for many years. However, a Net Applications report showed that dominance steadily, if slowly, decreasing. Whereas in October 2007 Microsoft Windows had 92.49 percent of the operating system market, in August 2008 that figure had dropped to 90.66 percent.