Watch Sunsets, photo-realistic buildings on Google Earth 4.3

There's a new beta version of Google Earthavailable which features revamped navigation controls and some slicknew layers like 3-D photo-realistic buildings in major cities andtime-lapse views of sunsets and sunrises.
Also new in Google Earth 4.3is access to the street view movies found in Google Maps. Just clickany of the camera icons and the familiar street view window will pop up.
The new navigation controls take some getting used to, but once youhave the hang of it they offer considerable more control over panningand tilting. Also handy is the new “North” button which quickly orientsyour current view by rotating until north is at the top.

Thesunrise and sunset movies are also quite impressive. Just fly to alocation you’d like to see and click the “sun” button in the toolbar.That will bring up a small timeline graphic and you can either hit playor drag the timeline slider to watch the day unfold.
Google Earth 4.3 is still a beta and certain features appear to bemissing (the old “streaming” message that would let you know when theapp was loading data doesn’t appear to be in the new version, whichmakes it difficult to tell whether something is not working or justloading very slowly. [Update: As some readers have pointed out inthe comments, I overlooked the new throbber in the lower right corner,which conveys the same information about loading data.). Still, if a few quirks don’t bother you, you can grab Google Earth 4.3 from the site, or by using the Google Updater.
The Google Earth team has released this video of some of the new features in action:

[via Google Operating System]