Safari 4 released today, offering "unparalled speed"

Among the torrent of news is the announcement that Safari 4 ships today, boasting "unparalleled speed," especially when compared to IE8 (this is Apple talking, not us). Included in the new browser is a full history search, featuring a cover flow view of the user's browsing history (as well as a full spotlight search). And it looks like they've thought a lot about the browser when building the new OS -- In Snow Leopard, when a plug-in crashes, the browser remains intact, meaning you can just reload the page, not the browser itself. Available today for Leopard, Tiger, and -- of course -- Windows.

Apple shipping Snow Leopard in September, $29 upgrade

After showing off Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" at last year's WWDC, Apple is finally ready to ship it out the door this coming September, for a quite reasonable upgrade fee of $29 for Leopard users (as opposed to the regular $129 for larger refreshes). While the added feature list is relatively slim, and there are few surprises between what was confirmed last year and the various leaks from developer previews, Apple's still giving users and developers some fun new tech to play with -- particularly the GPU-exploiting OpenCL, and the GrandCentral tech for developers to ease application optimization for multi-core processors. Pretty nerdy stuff, but if it makes our Dashboard Sudoku Widgets run faster, we can hardly complain. Other updates to the OS Apple is trotting out at WWDC:

• Apple rewrote the Finder, while keeping it mostly the same on the surface, for a bunch of "little benefits."
• There's built-in Microsoft Exchange support in the OS.
• The new version of QuickTime has a new "modern foundation," HTTP streaming and a whole new look.
• Snow Leopard has half the footprint of Leopard, amounting to 6GB in savings and 45% faster installs.
• New trackpads can handle handwriting recognition now, and there's new text selection "AI."
• Safari 4 is available for Windows, Leopard and Tiger, but Snow Leopard adds "Crash Resistance," which keeps browser and tabs intact even if a plugin crashes -- user just refreshes the page.

Possible iPhone 3G 2009 Shot

These shots of a matte black iPhone from Nowhereelse.fr match up to the rumors we've heard so far about a future iPhone, but who knows if it's real.

What we do see is a round hole that could be a front-facing camera, which is one thing that would get us REALLY excited at WWDC on Monday.

Leo Laporte Blows up at Mike Arrington

Google launches Chrome for Mac, Linux - with a caveat

Google late Thursday released developer-only versions of its Chrome browser for Mac and Linux, making good on a nine-month-old promise that it would eventually add those editions to the Windows version that debuted last September.

Mac and Linux versions are rough and unstable, warned Google. "We have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM!" said Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg, a pair of Chrome product managers, in an entry to aGoogle blog. "Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software."

The new versions lack important features and functionality, Smith and Grunberg warned, including compatibility with Adobe's Flash Player plug-in and printing. A current bug listcatalogs other missing pieces, ranging from a working bookmark manager -- users can bookmark pages, but there's no way to retrieve a bookmark -- to a memory leak.

Google launched Chrome Sept. 2, 2008, as a Windows-only browser, but began taking names for a notification list for Mac users that same day, and for Linux users shortly after.

Chrome accounted for approximately 1.8 percent of those used last month, according to the most recent data from Web metric company Net Applications, a surge of 27 percent from the month before.

On Windows, Chrome comes in three flavors: Google's developer, beta and stable versions, in ascending order of fit and finish. Google releases more developer preview builds than betas, which in turn accumulate until the company's satisfied with their progress enough to roll out another stable build.

"[We're] trying to get Google Chrome on these platforms stable enough for a beta release as soon as possible!" added Smith and Grunberg.

Although the two program managers acknowledged that the developer preview crashes,Computerworld ran the Mac browser for several hours without a hitch.

Both the Mac and Linux editions can be downloaded from Google's site.