Oct 8, 2010 08:10 GMT  ·  By

The Google Chrome team seems to be keeping up its promise to double down on the development time. With the first Google Chrome 7 beta having just landed, it's now time for the next chapter, Google Chrome 8.

The very latest Chromium builds now sport a major version number update, though, as is always the case, the change is mostly symbolic.

The "upgrade" from the last Chromium 7.0.548.0 to Chromium 8.0.549.0 fixes just one bug with the sync feature.

The next dev channel release will be labeled as Chrome 8. The upcoming major version is shaping up nicely and promises to be a much more worthwhile release than the, also upcoming, Chrome 7 stable.

While most of the updates in Chrome 7 are under the hood and won't impact the users in any noticeable way until the revamped Chrome Web Store launches, Chrome 8 comes with a lot more goodies.

Already, Chrome fans have a lot to look forward to, and Google still has work to do before graduating Chrome 8 to the beta channel and eventually to the stable channel.

Some of the biggest new features are full hardware acceleration and support for native 3D graphics via the proposed WebGL standard. Hardware acceleration has been the topic du jour for browsers, with all the IE9 hoopla.

Previous Chrome 7.0 builds already showed promising results in hardware acceleration benchmarks and support for the feature has now been enabled by default.

Similarly, WebGL promises hardware accelerated 3D graphics which tap into the native API of the particular operating system to enable web developers to bridge the gap between desktop and the web when it comes to gaming.

More recently, a number of features have been landing in Chrome Labs. Some come especially handy for Chrome OS, like the Background WebApps feature, Remoting and, to a lesser degree, the Cloud Print feature, but others are very interesting for regular Chrome users as well, like the two security features and the impressive Chrome Instant.

Google still has time to add a few more features, before Chrome 8 starts to ship in beta and stable form. But it's going to be a very interesting release for a couple more reasons, both the Chrome Web Store and Chromium OS are slated to launch soon.

Chromium 8.0.549.0 is available for download here.

Google Chrome for Windows is available for download here. Google Chrome for Linux is available for download here. Google Chrome for Mac is available for download here.