Google's Chrome to Come Out of Beta

It seems Chrome is shedding its Beta status and entering the big bad browser world for good. About time.

In an interview with Mike Arrington at TechCrunch’s Le Web conference, Google Vice President Marissa Meyer said that Chrome v1.0 would be available in the near future, however no details about a more solid release date were dished out.

For the past three months, Chrome has been in and out of the news. Most notably, of course, in the weeks after its release when Google had to reword its End User Licensing Agreement after it raised a few concerns about copyrights.

The wording of section 11 of the Chrome Terms of Service stated that by submitting, posting or displaying the content, you gave Google a “perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services.” Most people (well, most of those who actually bothered to read the EULA) had the same reaction we did. That being, “Uh, no?”

Rebecca Ward, Senior Product Counsel at Google said at the time that the company reuses chunks of Universal Terms of Service for the sake of simplicity and the claims made in the original agreement with Chrome were an oversight. "Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don’t apply well to the use of that product," Ward explained.

The blogging community calm again, attention turned toward the browser itself. During the first week of release, Chrome hit 1.48 percent of the market share before stabilizing around 1 percent. While numbers relaxed a little after the initial bloat of users who just wanted to try it out, there’s still a pretty decent amount of people using the browser. Net Applications reports that Chrome currently holds just over 0.8 percent of the market share.

Google has yet to release a beta version for Mac but is working on developing one. We’ll keep you posted on both the Mac version and the official release date for Chrome. Over and out.