After 11 months of ongoing development, Google Chrome for Macs and Linux is finally stable, moving out of the beta stage.
The company even admitted that for the first few months the popular browser was extremely buggy and should only be used by more advanced users. Today, that is no longer an issue.
Along with the “stable” tag, Chrome for Macs and Linux now include advanced syncing for bookmarks and settings, geolocation APIs, app cache and other HTML5 tools.
Perhaps more notably to the casual end user, the browsers now have access to all 4500 Chrome extensions.
Not included in the new release is built-in Flash, as you will need to manually download it. By Flash 10.1, Google promises a stable version.
Get the Windows version here: Chrome at AfterDawn
Get the now stable Mac and Linux versions here: http://www.google.com/chrome
Result for: beta stage
Netflix has announced the public beta of its streaming movie player for Mac computers, marking the first time Mac users can use the company’s extensive “Watch Instantly” library.
Users can now opt-in to try out the player as long they have Microsoft’s Silverlight animation plug-in.
Mac users will have access to over 12,000 titles and the company says they will continue to add more content on a daily basis. The program will become available outside of the beta stage by Christmas.
There is some DRM in the beta however which will limit the number of authorized devices to six, and each device must have Silverlight installed.
Result for: beta stage
Good Old Games, a European gaming company, announced in July that it will begin allowing gamers to access and download old PC games that are very hard to find legally or have been abandoned.
The company will provide titles from as far back as the early 80’s and in a downloadable format that is completely DRM-free. The games will also be reasonably priced, ranging from $5.99 to $9.99 per title. Also, once you have purchased the title, you can download it whenever you want, all the times you want.
The store has now hit its public beta stage.
“You won’t find any intrusive copy protection in our games; we hate draconian DRM schemes just as much as you do,” says the site. “Once you download a game, you can install it on any PC and re-download it whenever you want, as many times as you need, and you can play it without an internet connection.”
If you are interested, the full catalog of games is available here: Good Old Games: Game Catalog
