OStatic

When Google's Marissa Mayer told TechCrunch's Michael Arrington that Chrome would drop the beta designation less than two days ago, the implication was that it would happen pretty quickly. When you consider the length of some beta stages (and drawn out, fanfare driven gold releases), Chrome's 1.0 release yesterday was fast and relatively quiet.

InformationWeek shares a little of my aforementioned concern that taking an application out of the testing stage prematurely can have some serious consequences, and it does offer some insight into Google's thought processes.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is reporting that Google's vice president Marissa Mayer told him in an interview that Chrome will be coming out of beta.

Mayer didn't give a definite time frame, but one would assume that this would mean sooner rather than later. This announcement is a little surprising for a few reasons.

On Monday, the Mozilla team announced the general availability of Firefox 3.1 beta 2 for testing. Aside from increased localization support, a new Private Browsing mode, new tab switching and preview behaviors, and support for a number of new web technologies (such as the W3C Geolocation API and offline applications), the new beta release uses the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine by default, and has made tweaks to the Gecko engine to speed content rendering.

Not long ago the Moonlight development team announced that the Linux Silverlight adaptation was drawing ever nearer to the 1.0 release. On December 1st, the Moonlight 1.0 beta version was released.

The Moonlight beta installs easily, and works quite well (though some sites respond better than others, this seems to hold true with Silverlight in a native Windows environment as well). The few hiccups I encountered during installation had more to do with network congestion and user error than the application itself.