Google's Chrome beta for Mac expected early December

A beta version of Google’s Chrome browser for the Mac is set to land in December.

Mountain View had already gone on record to say that the test preview would arrive before the end of 2009.

In a Chromium developer mailing list yesterday, the company’s Chrome product manager Nick Baum revealed that Google plans to release the beta early next month.

The current iteration of the browser - Chrome 4.0 - is only available in beta form for Windows users. Linux and Mac OS X fans only have access to a rough-round-the-edges developer preview of the surfing tool for now.

That looks set to change before the year is out, however.

Google’s dev team has been beavering away at an extensions presentation tech, dubbed “BrowserActions”, which currently only works in Windows and Linux.

The world’s largest ad broker wants to get as many developers as possible to play with its new BrowserActions tool and, to encourage them to tinker with it now, Baum confirmed the wait was nearly over for the Chrome Mac beta.

"The earlier you switch [to BrowserActions], the more time you will have to polish your experience for our beta launch in early December," he said.

"We realise this means dropping Mac support for a couple of weeks, but we already have people working on that. If you prioritise the Windows and Linux versions, we'll bring you cross-platform parity as soon as we can!" ®