• Information Week, Friday, December 12, 2008 11:45 AM

It just may be the shortest beta testing period of any Google product: After a mere 3.5 months, the search king has taken its Chrome Web browser out of beta. Gmail, for example, has been in beta since April 2004. So, what's new? "The engineering team has been fixing a lot of bugs and working on stability, working on making the product really rock solid," Brian Rakowski, product manager for Google Chrome, tells Information Week. He added that Google isn't putting a lot into the "1.0" tag: "We're trying, throughout the whole Chrome development process, to release features very quickly, so we have a lot more stuff coming down the pipe. The main point of this is that it's a rock-solid product that's ready for anybody to use, not just early adopters."

Is that the same thing as saying that Chrome is both done and still a work in progress? "There's no question that we have a lot of work to do," Rakowski conceded. "If you compare it to other projects of this scope, it's not unusual to have many thousands of open bugs. What we try to do is triage those bugs carefully and make sure that we're taking care of the most important ones, the ones that are affecting most users. Lots of those bugs have been targeted for this release to close."

Meanwhile, the report says "the most meaningful consequence" of Chrome 1.0 is that distribution partners will now be able to offer Chrome as a finished product. That should help it move beyond the paltry 0.83 percent share of the browser market that Chrome now occupies.

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