Google released Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux Thursday--but only in rough developer preview versions that the company warns are works in progress.



"In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM," Google product managers Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg said in a blog post, evidently trying to employ a little reverse psychology. "Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software."



Until now, Google's open-source browser has been a Windows-only product, and some Mac and Linux users have been clamoring for their own version. Google coders have been working to rebuild some Chrome components, such as its graphical interface and its sandbox that isolates different processes from each other, to move beyond just Windows.



Google offers three versions of Chrome: stable, beta, and developer preview. The Mac OS X and Linux versions fall into this last, category, the most buggy and least tested and complete.