This entry was posted by admin on March 8, 2010 at 9:14 pm under IT News.

Development of Google’s Chrome browser hit a snag late last week as an update caused the development version of the software to crash whenever the offline version of Gmail was loaded.

Critics were quick to label the dev build error as a serious gaffe by Google developers, but others – like tech blog Gadgetsteria – came to the search giant’s defense, saying that dev versions of software are even less complete than beta tests, and that error-free programming was not to be expected in such a preliminary release.

Nevertheless, IT professionals may have been affected by the bug, which has not yet been fixed by Google. Although remote access to some services – such as SAP data management – is becoming an increasingly widespread feature of the enterprise IT world, more basic functions like email can cause serious problems if they fail.

Disabling offline access to Gmail is currently the only way to avoid the problem, according to CNET. Deleting some Google Gears files relating to the offline application may also be required.