Chrome For Mac Continues March Forward With Bookmarks And Better Flash

picture-43We’ve already written a half dozen times or so about how the Mac version of Google’s Chrome browser continues to surge towards being fully usable on a daily basis. And today brings another update on that front.

The latest builds of Chromium for Mac have added support for the importing of bookmarks and now features a bookmarks bar by default. This was one of the features that many users had been stating they would need before they started using it full time. Well, now those users can.

There’s also good news on another front: Flash is now much more usable in Chrome for Mac. Previously, we wrote when it started working to play videos on YouTube, but now you can actually pause and jump around those videos just like on any other web browser.

One word of caution is a few times, entering HD mode for YouTube videos caused the Flash plug-in to crash. But, as Google has been touting, the crash did not crash the whole browser, instead I just got a small drop-down notification that to plug-in was shut down. Opening a new tab, re-enabled it.

There is also a slightly new Tab homepage in these latest builds. And there is now the ability restore thumbnails that you have previously removed on this Tab page, which is nice. And while I’m not entirely sure that this is new, you can set the default search engine as well. Though, humorously, Bing is not an option, only Live Search is.

While I’ve been using these Chromium builds on and off for casual browsing, mostly just to test them, I think I’ve hit the point where I’m ready to try using it full-time. I’m simply having a hard time finding things that don’t work on it. Sure, plug-in support isn’t fully baked yet, but as a non-Firefox user, I don’t really use plug-ins anyway. And yes, many of the themes are hideous, but the default one looks pretty nice — though I would like to see nicer-looking folders for bookmarks. The yellow ones remind me of Windows 3.1.

As DownloadSquad noted earlier today, these latest builds of Chromium are labeled as version 4.0+. Might we see an official public launch of Chrome for Mac when the software is ready to hit version 4.0? It’s looking possible, and I’d bet that will be sooner rather than later.

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