Google Blesses OS X and Linux With Chrome (We Willingly Accept)

Ok, so it took a little over a year, but Google has finally brought its super speedy Chrome browser to Linux and OS X (To be fair, the cutting edge could install Chrome on their *nix-based machines for some time, but today it became official with the unveiling of beta). Like its Windows counterpart, the Linux and Mac versions of Chrome pass the Acid 3 Web standards test and have support for portions of HTML5, including embedding video and audio in pages without the need for Flash. Also included are offline data storage, which Google will be switching to in place of the cloud-syncing Gears in the coming months.

As if that was reason enough to celebrate, the Chrome Extensions Gallery also went live today, taking one more reason away from those still clinging to Firefox for daily browsing needs. There is one strange wrinkle though -- the Mac version of Chrome does not support extension as of yet. Despite having no trouble on Linux and Windows, Chrome and OS X can not get their act together enough to put a Gmail notifier icon in the tool bar.

Either way, those of us who don't see a Microsoft logo when we boot up our PCs are quite excited to get some official acknowledgment from the mighty Goog. And maybe this will light a fire under the ass of Mozilla and get them working hard to make Firefox as fast as Chrome. [From: Chrome Blog and Chromium Blog, via Download Squad]

Tags: browser, browsers, chrome, extensions, linux, os x, OsX, top