If you love the new features of Mac OS X Lion but you’re not a fan of Safari, you’re in luck. Google has updated it’s browser—Chrome—to re-enable a multi-touch gesture that changed with the Lion operating system. With Lion, a three-finger swipe in either direction swipes through open full-screen apps or desktops. Previously in Chrome, that same three-finger gesture moved you forward or backward in browsing history (in Lion this is now a two-finger gesture).
However, according to a CNET report, Google is Lion “compatible” when it comes to these gestures. They report:
Yesterday, though, Google released Chrome 14.0.835.0 for Mac (and 14.0.835.0 for Linux, and 14.0.835.2 for Windows) that changes the forward and backward navigation to two-finger swipe gestures on Apple machines. The fix worked on my MacBook Pro, but it’ll be some weeks before Chrome 14 arrives as the stable version intended for mainstream users.
This report also points out a few other changes:
The new version also adds support for a new communication protocol for Web Sockets, a high-speed communication mechanism between browsers and Web servers, according to Chrome team member Jason Kersey in the blog post about the new version.
Also new are tweaks to Chrome’s support for multiple user profiles, a feature that will let people use the Web with different online personas. Multiple profile support was an early Chrome feature, but Google pulled back for a long development hiatus.
Hopefully, these changes from Google will be the beginning of a wave of updates for many developers that take advantage of new Lion features, such as multi-touch, full screen, and more. What apps are you wanting to see updated?