OStatic

Late last week, Sam took a close look at the rapidly changing browser landscape. In one of the posts linked therein, Keir Thomas speculates that Firefox may well have just given up the ghost, what with an alpha version of Chrome now being available for Linux (or, at the very least, Ubuntu).

I don't think it is, nor is it going to be, quite that easy. Firefox isn't without issue -- or momentum. And Chrome for Linux? In all reality, it doesn't exist, yet. Chrome may have a number of advantages over other browsers, including Firefox, on other platforms. But if it's still too early to call this fight on Windows, declaring the superior browser on Linux is pretty much a coin toss.

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.

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.