Google quietly revs Chrome dev to version 7

[nsane.forums]

Just a few weeks after the Chrome beta updated to version 6, Google upgraded the developers version of Chrome to 7 on Thursday. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Chrome dev 7.0.503.0 comes accompanied only by minor bug fixes.

There are some small tweaks to the Wrench options menu on Mac, and IP addresses typed into the location bar work when browsing in offline mode. There are several anticipated changes planned for Chrome 7 that either haven't yet been implemented yet or require manual activation. These include the Native Client support for Web apps, which can be activated with the command line flag "--enable-nacl". Mac and Linux users will need to include "--no-sandbox". Google recommends only using this to test the Native Client feature, and not for standard Web browsing. While the company doesn't specify why, it's reasonable to speculate that disabling the sandbox is something that will decrease the average user's security.

Bugs are nothing new to the developers version of Chrome, which is intended to be a rougher version of the browser than the beta or stable channels. A new bug indicates that the new developers version is incompatible with streaming Netflix movies, while another appears to be affecting the rendering of extension fonts. Some users are reporting that the search function in the location bar is no longer working for them, although that doesn't appear to be affecting all users at this time. Because these bugs are in the developers version, it's expected that they'll get fixed before the beta and stable versions receive updates.

One interesting bug from the previous version of Chrome dev that introduced a severe security risk in conjunction with the LastPass encrypted password manager extension was repaired in the new version. Google did not mention this in its changelog.

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