The most current developer build of the Google Chrome browser has fixes for some of the initial Silverlight problems reported when the beta was made available. The beta did load the Silverlight plug-in, but people experienced several bugs. On the sites I tried Chrome would render the application, but any interaction from keyboard or mouse wouldn’t get passed to the application. This is now fixed and Chrome now runs all the Silverlight 2 applications I’ve tried without any problem. I’ve tested it with the sample applications I’ve built (YouCard and DiveLog); as well as with some of the larger reference applications such as Hard Rock Memorabilia and the Microsoft Health CUI demo application. All of them work just fine. Even things like the browser navigation integration in the Dive Log application works as expected.

One of the cool things Google have done with Chrome is to make it really easy to run early developer builds. This 7-step tutorial explains how to enable what Google calls the Developer Channel. What this does is that Chrome will now check a different repository for updates and new releases than people using the Beta Channel (default). After running a tool that enables the Developer Channel you get fresh builds through the automatic update system (the about dialog).

This is great news for the Silverlight community as this clearly indicates that Chrome will have full Silverlight support when it comes out of beta. I've included some screenshots of Silverlight applications running in Chrome. If you want to stay on top of current builds of Google Chrome I also recommend following the Twitter user @GetGoogleChrome.

Update

• Jon Galloway has written an easy to follow tutorial with screenshots on how to enable the developer channel.
• Shawn Wildermuth reports that Chrome doesn't work when you have "windowless=true" on your plugin. I think he's right, as the only one of my sample applications that doesn't work is the webcam proof-of-concept. For the webcam application I use windowless to overlay HTML (Flash) content on top of Silverlight.
• Shawn also mentioned Windowless Apps, but without going into any details. One of the cool features of Chrome is that you can use it as a site specific browser. On any page you can create an "application shortcut". This will create a shortcut on your desktop that will launch a browser surface with no UI around it, letting you threat a site as a single application. This is an interesting scenario for Silverlight applications. I've added a screenshot showing the YouCard application running as a Chrome Application.
• Samiq also reports success with running Silverlight in Chrome.