Google has pushed out a new minor update to the desktop version of Google Earth. The new version is 7.1.4.1529 dated March 30th, 2015. Thank you to GEB reader AC for letting us know first (we have had several other readers since comment on the new version). AC told us about it over 2 weeks ago, but we were unable to confirm until last week as Google pushes out updates of this nature gradually. Your Google Earth should automatically update over the coming weeks, or you can, as we did, re-download and install it from the Google Earth website. We have successfully done this with Google Earth and Google Earth Pro on Windows and the consumer version for Mac OS X. We have also seen comments from Linux users on the help forums.
The previous version was 7.1.2.2041 dated July 10th, 2013, so this is the first update in nearly two years! Still, this is very good news as it suggests Google is still working on Google Earth for desktop and supports recent comments from Google about future updates to Google Earth coming.
We asked Google and confirmed just recently what we suspected. That this is a minor bug-fix release for the different versions of Google Earth, and they have not yet started rolling it out to all users yet due to testing with new installer software for some of the platforms. They said release notes will be forthcoming once it becomes more widely available. We’ll report here on the GEB when we know more.
GEB reader AC reported that it still crashes in Street View. We have so far failed to get it to crash in Street View in either the old or the new versions, despite testing a number of places that used to cause the crash. If any of our readers gets it to crash in Street View, please let us know the coordinates in the comments. There have been a few installer issues mentioned in the Google Earth help forums, and Google has responded they are working on them.
About Timothy Whitehead
Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
Clicking the download button on the Google Earth website opens a second page where GEB readers may wish to uncheck the install Chrome option, and it is also worth opening the custom options. The page still refers to the latest GE version as 7.1, and no more.
It would be good to know what bugs are fixed, and certainly preventing crashes in certain 3D areas e.g. London when going straight from 3D into Street View would be very helpful, although switching off the 3D layer stops the crashes.
I am still getting the 1603 error
Great! Street view now is no longer crashes !
well this is a bit confusing, considering the news of the last few months I was mentally preparing for GE to be discontinued but now they bring an update. we’ll see.
How do you get the update I am still getting error 1603
Try the offline installer found here
Seems to crash quite a lot and for some reason, now I keep getting a high CPU usage alert when I use GE. Weird, might go back an old version.
Wonder if they fixed the color palette bug in GE, which has been there for about 5 years. If you change the placemark icon color and text color, the color’s displayed in the placemark window are all wonky, even though they’re fine within GE.
Tim, as you mentioned, I did get crashes when trying to use Street View in this latest version of GE. I reverted back to GE 6.2 as I feel annoyed with the lack of options in GE7 (icon/label size, font, terrain disabling, etc).
In the meantime, I decided to try Google Earth Pro and it did freeze just as you drag the orange SV man (so probably a problem in GEP with drawing the blue SV lines overlay). As GE always worked fine (and faster) on OpenGL mode in my AMD Mobility Radeon HD5470 graphics card, I hadn’t tried the DirectX mode. I can confirm that in DX street view doesn’t crash and have been using GEP 7.1 for days now.
Why Sea images (little far from the shore) can’t get detailed?
Does anyone know?
So my Google Earth Pro automatically updated to 7.1.4.1529 but the imagery remains at April 3 2009 on my home computer but at work it updated the imagery to the latest one shown in Google Maps.This seems quite odd and I can’t seem to find an explanation for this anywhere. Anyone have any ideas?
Can you give me the location so I can check what imagery is available there?
One possibility is that you have the 3D layer turned off on one of the computers.
Ah yes, that’s what it was, I turned on the 3D layer and it worked.
Anyway the lat-long are 49° 5’14.45″N 123° 4’26.11″W
Thanks for the reply and solving my problem.
The new version of Google Earth finally fixed the longstanding Oslo blur bug. In 3d buildings, Oslo, Norway had a massive blurry strip running through the middle of it. This is fixed in the new version, but not in the old. I have the old Google Earth Pro and the new normal Google Earth so I checked using that.
Blue dots still do not work in GE, it seems to me. I wonder when this is gonna be solved.
Hi,
I have been using Google Earth for a while without any problem until I switched to Yosemite and GE version 7.0 and 7.1 (MacBook Pro Mid 2012).
Since then GE has been crashing whenever I launched it.
Following several posts, I have tried to trace where the problem was coming from and have used Little Snitch, which is a highly configurable firewall, to manually accept each of the connections GE makes to various google servers.
This process seems to slow down connections to these servers, with GE ending up working properly. However, each time I stop the network filter and let GE connect all by itself, GE crashes again.
It should be noted that I have a relatively fast fiberoptic connection.
I was wondering whether anybody else experienced such a behavior when:
– manually accepting connexions between GE and google servers, and
– being connected through a high bandwidth connection.
Thanks in advance
Have you tried removing the plugins detailed here:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/8A6mgYBn7ik
Yes, all plugins and other suspected files described in several forums have been looked for. There were none.
Both GE and GE Pro will not download, says it gets error 1603, what’s that.
Use the offline installer found here:
https://support.google.com/earth/answer/168344