14 DAY TRIAL // As expected, Google Chrome 12 has graduated from the Beta channel and is now widely available to all users. If you're running the latest Chrome 11, the update should be coming your way very soon via the automated channel. If you can't wait for the auto-update mechanism to kick in you can grab it from the download link below.
Google Chrome 12 adds several new features, on top of the bug fixes and performance improvements that accompany each new release. On the security and privacy front, Chrome 12 comes with enhanced Safe Browsing and support for Flash local shared objects control integration.
The latest release adds hardware acceleration for CSS, speeding up animations and fancy website designs. Google Chrome 12 also drops support for Google Gears.
"Today’s new stable release of Chrome brings improvements in security, privacy, and graphics to Chrome’s 160 million users," Adrienne Walker, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.
"Chrome is now more secure, thanks to enhancements to our Safe Browsing technology. In addition to protecting you from certain malware and phishing websites, Chrome now warns you before downloading some types of malicious files," she explained.
Adobe Flash Player 10.3 added support for integrating content control policies from the browser, enabling users to clear locally stored data from the browser's settings page. Chrome 12 brings support for this feature.
"This release includes support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, which means you’ll get a snazzier experience in some web pages and web apps that choose to implement 3D effects," she added.
Google even provided a fun way of checking out what 3D CSS can do with a new Chrome experiment featuring the characters from "Shaun the Sheep." The experiment only works on Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.6 and above, you won't get hardware accelerated 3D CSS othewise.
Google Chrome for Windows is available for download here.