Google has released an official developer preview of Google Chrome for the Mac. Rather than digging through nightly development builds, you can download the developer preview of the WebKit-based browser at Google's official webpage.

Chrome sports several features similar to Safari 4 in Snow Leopard, such as sandboxing - each tab runs as its own process, so if one crashes, it doesn't bring down the whole browser. It also sports the "tabs on top" interface present in some builds of the Safari 4 beta released earlier this year. Some people hated tabs on top in Safari, but others eventually got used to it and even missed the feature when it was omitted from the final release of Safari 4; if tabs on top is your thing, then Chrome has you covered.

Chrome supports importing bookmarks, settings, and history from whatever browser you're currently using, so if you're curious to see how it runs on a Mac, go ahead and give it a try. Let us know in the comments if you run into any issues.

[Via Download Squad]

CNN chatted with our good friends at DLS about the news network's iPhone app (scheduled to hit an App Store near you very soon), and it actually sounds pretty premium: in-app video, breaking news live video streaming, a Coverflow-style way to browse news information, the ability to store news to read later, and social sharing through Facebook, Twitter, and the usual suspects. CNN even says they want to add more to the app in the future, including some iReport-style news delivery functions, so people with iPhones out in the world can send news in as quickly as possible.

Ok, CNN, we get it -- you care about this one. It does sound like they're making a major push in terms of making their content interactive on the iPhone, but on the other hand, maybe they're just trying to sell you on the "premium" price: $1.99, with (we're told) non-intrusive advertising included. Obviously, $2 is cheap, but on the other hand, especially with advertising both from the network itself and outside clients, the crankiest of App Store browsers will probably flinch at it a little bit. If you are interested, however, CNN would love to take your money: their app should be available in the App Store as soon as Apple lets it through.

Are you the type of person who just can't settle down? Do you find your needs just can't be met by any one of the multiple options available to you? Can you even remember how many different browsers you've been with? If that sounds like you, you should be glad to hear that Choosy has left beta.

We've mentioned Choosy before but in case you missed it during the beta cycle, here's what Choosy does for you: Choosy is a preference pane which lets you keep your browser options open.

Do you love Safari, but sometimes find that you need to use Firefox for a particular website? Are you a fan of Fluid (which lets you create site-specific browsers), or you want all your RSS links to open in your personalized Google Reader browser?

When you select a link, instead of your default browser, a Choosy window will appear; you can configure it to show all of your available browsers, or just the ones which are currently running. Or you can set a default to use except if you hold down the shift key, for example.

That latter functionality is what led me to give Choosy another look. I tried it during the beta period and found that most of the time I wanted links to open in Safari, but there were some I wanted to open in Firefox or Fluid. While having to choose a browser for every link proved to be too distracting, the 1.0 version allows you to create very precise rules.

For example, I can setup Safari to be my default browser, but if I click a link while holding down the shift/command/alt key, then that link will automatically be opened in Firefox.

My favorite rule? If Web address contains constantcontact.com then use Firefox. Constant Contact is a great service, but they are very aggressive about which web browsers they support. Now I can stop thinking about this, and if I come across a Constant Contact link, it will automatically open it in Firefox.

Do you have a Fluid SSB for Facebook or Twitter? If so, you can make sure that all of those links open in your site-specific browser.

Choosy is shareware. You can try it free and without any limitation for 45 days. In my experience that will be plenty of time to decide if Choosy is the right choice for you. If it is, you can register it for $12 and continue to enjoy surfing the web with multiple partners... err, browsers.

If you're looking for a bright spot in the Mac market share numbers after the recent dips, Net Applications has your back. The May survey indicates an uptick in Safari's share of browser usage -- up to 8.43% from 8.21% in April, and 2% higher than a year earlier. Firefox continues to be the big 2nd banana to leading browser choice IE, with a 22.5% share. It's not yet clear how the IE8 release will drive browser adoption.

Operating system numbers (which aren't definitive, but provide a reasonable indicator of usage) also show a slight rise for Mac OS X (9.81% from 9.73%), also more than 2% over the year-ago allocation.

On the mobile side, the survey company notes that Android browsing usage started out with the same adoption curve as the iPhone/iPod touch, but has since fallen off that pace. Coverage of the Palm Pre starts soon.

[via Ars Technica]

Gather around, Apple fans. I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that there is a preliminary version of Google Chrome up and running. Sort of. Google's Mike Pinkerton has posted a couple of screenshots of Chrome for Mac on his blog, including the very first time he used it to load a webpage. It's coming, folks.

Now the bad news from Mike himself, "We've got a very very long way to go." He says that the WebKit that ships with Mac OS X doesn't do what they developers need right out of the box, and it took a lot of cajoling to get it to comply. If it's anything like the acrobatics I must perform each weekday morning to get my kids out the door in time to catch the school bus, Google's Mac devs will be busy indeed.

Although Google's Chrome browser is currently only available to Windows users (unless you are running an Intel-based Mac and VMWare Fusion or Parallels), its WebKit underpinnings mean that Safari, and other WebKit-based browsers, can benefit from Google's code.

One of the larger innovations of Google Chrome, the V8 JavaScript engine, is incredibly fast. The WebKit project has its own new JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish, used in Mobile Safari and the WebKit nightlies. Still, the code base for V8 along with the Skia graphics library are making their way into the main WebKit repository. The Skia graphics library may already be in some of the newest nightly builds.

What does this mean for Mac and Safari users? Superficially, it might mean very little for right now, however, the Safari team can choose to implement any of the Chrome features that have been added back to the repository. That's the beauty of open source.

The best browser for the Mac, Camino, has gotten even better with the release of Camino 1.6. I know what some of you are thinking, 'How can you say that Camino is the best browser for the Mac? It doesn't support extensions, it isn't made by Apple, and it won't buy me a pony!'

All of those things are true (though I'm still hopeful that I'll get a Camino pony in the mail any day now), but for my money no other browser on the Mac feels more like an OS X app than Camino does (your opinion may vary, and I'm sure you'll let me know why I'm wrong in the comments). New in Camino 1.6 are a host of UI changes that make the browser much nicer to look at, as well as improvements in navigating tabs, and a search interface more like Safari's (though Safari's highlighting of search terms within webpages still bests Camino's).

Camino 1.6 is available now, and is free and open source.

The Surfin' Safari blog dedicated to the open source WebKit project (which powers Safari on Mac OS X, Windows and even the iPhone) has announced the availability of Safari 3.0.2 beta. This isn't a major release by any means, but it does contain a healthy list of squashed bugs, as well as fixes for mysteriously disappearing text in a variety of situations. The announcement post contains links to specific information for Mac and Windows users, as well as a link to more security issues fixed in this new beta.

To snag the new version for either platform you're using, simply head to Apple's Safari beta download page and pick your poison. Of course, we must remind you this is a beta, so it is still not all that uncommon for Safari 3 to crash, hiccup and potentially eat your cat. Besides, one could question whether your cat should be getting very close to your computer to begin with.

Move over Shiira, cuz there's another browser in town that can bring the power of Exposé to its tabs. Cocoamug Software's TabExposé enables Safari (even the new v3 beta) with a configurable shortcut key to display the current window's tabs in an Exposé-style layout. To be sure, however, it only works on the current window and the tabs that window contains; if you have more than one window open with tabs in Safari, the others will sit in the background.

TabExposé works well in Safari 3 beta on my MacBook Pro, and with extra options like applying a color bar to the top of the tabs when TabExposé is invoked, $4.90 is a very, very tiny price to pay for such a handy Safari tab management tool.

This week's podcast covers 1Passwd, the password manager and autofill tool that brings some really unique features and multi-browser support for the Keychain to the table. For just under 8 minutes I demonstrate some of the killer features of this app that go above and beyond the norm, and the whole thing weighs in at a mere 28MB. Snag it from our iTunes Store Podcast directory, this direct link or our own podcast rss feed. Enjoy!

A browser doesn't seem like it should have that adverse of an effect on one's system performance. Aside from the power users who surf for hours at a time and leave their browser running for days on end, one's browser shouldn't be dragging the rest of the class down.

Macenstein, on the other hand, has used a few pseudo-scientific tests to determine otherwise. While the debate still rages as to which browser is the 'best,' or the fastest, or the least detrimental memory hog, Dr. Macenstein has apparently outed Safari as a fairly selfish system resource gobbler, able to slow at least some operations by 76 percent. The tests performed by the monster of all things Mac included a fairly tricked out G5 PowerMac, as well as Quad Core Mac Pro just for good measure. Just to round the tests out, Macenstein eventually added Camino and OmniWeb to the original test sequence of Safari and Firefox. These browsers were all tested separately against opening/saving a fairly hefty PSD in Photoshop, as well as rendering a project out of After Effects (remember: those two apps still have to run emulated in Rosetta on the Mac Pro).

The cliff notes results? In nearly every test, Safari (running in the background) was found to deal a significant blow to performance and efficiency, causing the three aforementioned operations to take noticeably longer. To make things even more bizarre, Safari was actually found to not affect performance when exporting a video for the iPod with QuickTime.

At the end of the day, no one is really sure why Apple's browser is making so many waves in the performance pool, but a healthy comment thread on the post is already hard at work. For anyone serious about Safari, here's hoping Apple is already aware of the issue and has brought their browser in line for Leopard.

In a post cleverly titled The same thing we do every night, Pinky (an Animaniacs/Pinky and the Brain reference), the WebKit blog Surfing Safari links a Switch to a Mac article which notes that Safari's market share has risen once again. Continuing its upward stride from October's 3.53 percent, Market Share now finds Safari at 4.03 percent, though data suggests that Safari's growth, while still on the up and up, has actually slowed in the past month.

Since the overall Mac OS market share is still progressing quite nicely - up to 5.39 percent now - this slow in Safari's growth could be attributed to any number of factors, one of which I'm willing to bet could be all those switchers coming over and bringing Firefox with them (note: that's just my theory; I can't find numbers right now to back it up). Still, this is good news for the spread of Apple either way, as it can probably be safe to bet that the company won't be stopping the development of Safari anytime soon.

People are very serious about what browser they use, and I understand why. I spend most of my computing life using one browser or another (my current fave is the Intel optimized FireFox variant). Now, I'm just an average Joe, so you can take my thoughts on browsers with a grain of salt, but Zeldman is a web design wizard. He knows of what he speaks.

This is why I found this post titled 'Safari better than Firefox?' so very interesting. Zeldman spends a good deal of time listing all the things that are right with Firefox's engine, but one thing that is very wrong is text rendering. Safari, according to Zeldman and my eyes, renders text much better than Firefox. It is true that Safari is Mac only, so it need not worry about cross platform text rendering, but that doesn't change the fact that text looks very nice in Safari and not so nice in Firefox.

I know Adium can insert links from some browsers by itself, but I just found a script at the Adium Xtras site which offers much more fine-grained control over inserting a link from any browser, with the page name's descriptive title linked nice and clean, instead of the long ugly URL you get from copy/pasting. As you can see, specific commands are included for all the major browsers (and even some not-so-major ones), as well as a catch-all Default Browser command. The ones I can test seem to work pretty well, though I'll admit I don't have any copies of iCab or Netscape lying around. Enjoy.

HistoryHound is a handy search utility for anyone who does a lot of surfing and RSS reading between multiple apps. It offers a full text search of most of the major Mac OS X browsers including Mozilla's, OmniWeb and even Opera, as well as two of the more popular RSS readers: Pulp Fiction and NetNewsWire 2. It can be called with a keyboard shortcut, or a small search panel can be left to float above other windows, always waiting to do your bidding.

How HistoryHound searches is customizable, as is how far back into the history it shines its spotlight. If you don't like bouncing between applications HistoryHound also includes its own WebKit-based browser for previewing any of your search results.

This swiss army knife of a history utility has also recently been updated to a Universal Binary, along with a few other minor but useful feature tweaks. A fully-functioning 30 day demo is available, while a full license is $19.95.