This is a rant (kind of). The Chrome browser is the only software that I've ever used that updates itself automatically and yet makes it almost impossible to know what version I'm using relative to what's current and what's in beta.
Before I get a hundred emails telling me I'm an idiot (which I'll freely admit to), and I should just use "about:version" in the omnibox, let me add that the info from the version command is only half the problem. Here's what I get: Google Chrome 4.0.249.43 (Official Build 34537) WebKit 532.5 V8 1.3.18.16 User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/ 532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.43 Safari/532.5 [Oddly, though I copy the text from the "about:version" command, it doesn't copy the colons, but does paste properly into a text editor with two columns.] So, I'm using version 4.0.249.43 build 34537; what's the problem?? 1. "about:version" does not indicate whether I'm running the public release or the beta. 2. "about:version" does not show the last time that my version was updated; given that this update is completely invisible, I have no idea if a computer I'm using has a recent update or not. [Yes, I can get a message that my browser is up-to-date, but it still doesn't tell me if I'm in beta or not or when it was lasted.] 3. The Chrome home page (http://www.google.com/chrome), while admirably clean, does not indicate what the current release is, so it's of no help to me in determining my own status. 4. The beta page (http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/chrome/beta/) is also oddly silent on this issue, as well as what the latest features are, or how to provide feedback. The user is merely directed to the blog, which while informative, does not have an actual list of new features, nor any versioning info, so I still don't know what my version 4.0.249.43 actually corresponds to. 5. Even worse, the beta home page tells me: "You are currently using Google Chrome. By downloading, you will switch to the BETA version." This is really confusing, as I think I'm already using the beta version, but Google is telling me I'm not, but I could switch to it. This obfuscation seems so pervasive that it must be deliberate, but I can't figure out why this would be, while the statement "You are currently using Google Chrome. ..." seems just wrong. All of this would seem to be trivial to fix, but am I the only one who sees these issues as problems? Thanks, adam
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