Google Chrome 3 launched today. Congrats to everyone who contributed improvements. There are many improvements including themes - a great and easy way of adding some color to your browser!
But my favorite aspect of this launch is that it continues our commitment to ship features frequently. In the early days of Firefox, we did a preview release launch about once a quarter, and the growing community at the time loved how quickly we were making progress and the fact that they could see it so easily. This inspired us when we designed the launch process for Chrome. By focusing on tightly scoped stable releases, we are able to move quickly and deliver features to all Chrome users as quickly as possible (typically once per quarter). People interested in testing newer features can find this in the beta channel which updates roughly once a month. And those who want the bleeding edge can find the very newest features and experiments on the Dev channel, which updates once a week.
Much has been written about the joys of developing web software and how the development model allows for frequent checkpoints with your user community. By developing a seamless autoupdate system we’ve been able to simulate this with client software and as a result we enjoy many of the same benefits.
The only thing more exciting to me than this system and what it’s allowed us to do so far is what it’s going to allow us to do in the future. 2010 is going to be an exciting year!
