Google Chrome's Out of Beta. Now What?

While other products are in beta for years, Google has turned Chrome into a final product in months. What does it have up its sleeve?

 

Just three months after the release of Chrome, Google is following through on its vow to remove the "beta" label from its upstart browser -- making it a rare final product from a company notorious for its seemingly endless beta cycles.

Since its inception, Chrome has served as a test bed for new browser technologies, such as security models, Web standards support and transfer protocols -- experiments that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has said it hadn't wanted to attempt in connection with other, established open source efforts, like Mozilla Firefox. The company has issued 14 updates to its browser, almost at a rate of one per week since its release.

Now, with release 15, Google has dropped the beta label from Chrome, signaling that it considers the browser a "general availability," or final, product.

However, this doesn't mean that Chrome won't continue seeing improvements.

"We are by no means done," Linus Upson, engineering director at Google, told InternetNews.com. "We still have to add auto fill [for Web forms], better RSS (define) handling is on deck and we're also doing bigger things like getting it running on Mac and Linux and adding an extension system."

Google has steadily made improvements in Chrome's features since its debut, addressing audio and video handling, hardware conflicts, render speed and JavaScript performance. The company also added a bookmark manager for power users who maintain up to thousands of links.

Chrome eventually will get features from the Google Toolbar that's available for Internet Explorer and Firefox, the company said. But the effort won't entail a direct port of the toolbar, which offers utilities like a pop-up blocker, translation and Web-based bookmarks -- instead, Chrome will just incorporate some of its features.

Upson also said there would not be any integration or tying of Chrome to Google Apps.

However, Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, thinks Google has more up its sleeve. "There's no question there's a lot of browsers out there, but at the same time, from Google's standpoint, when they go into anything, it has a strategic end in sight," he told InternetNews.com.

"Today, with a browser like this, they are clearly putting a stake in the ground. Over time is when you have to watch what they do with it," he added. "If it's a strategic issue today, they will want to integrate it with Apps in the future."