Google Chrome 2.0.171.0 comes at just over a week since the release of the previous development milestone Build 2.0.170.0. At the start of this week, Chrome 1.0 also evolved, and managed to reach version 1.0.154.53, a release set up to address a number of bugs. According to the Mountain View-based search giant the focus with Chrome 2.0.171.0 was to increase the reliability of the browser, while also enhancing the end user experience. At the same time, there are also minor feature additions introduced.

Jonathan Conradt, engineering program manager, explained that Google Chrome 2.0.171.0 featured WebKit version 530.4 and version 1.1.1.4 of its underlying V8 JavaScript engine. Furthermore, the latest iteration of Chrome 2.0 brings to the table “a new FTP implementation; Experimental Bookmark Menu (use bookmark-menu), Web Workers (use enable-web-workers), Implement SSL renegotiation, pressing the Del key while an item is selected in the form suggestion popup deletes that suggestion from the DB,” Conradt added.

Google is undoubtedly making headway with the development of Chrome. The Mountain View company is also aggressively pushing the browser through its web properties, leveraging websites such as YouTube in order to increase its installed base. Internet Explorer remains the easiest target for all Microsoft competitors, simply because of IE's market share. The Redmond company released Internet Explorer 8 on March 19, 2009, a browser release that it envisions as being capable to win back some of the ground lost to rivals such a Google, Firefox and Opera.

Conradt also enumerated some of the fixes delivered by Google with Chrome 2.0.171.0: “add command line switch "-new-ftp" for new portable FTP; add the directory listing code for the new portable FTP; SSL improvements; fix excessive CPU when scrolling Flash; fix crash on showing info bubble; aligning text to the right, especially RTL languages; fix dragging a Chrome window which has a single tab by the tab itself; do correct hit testing for context menu items; add support for progressive JPEGs with MIME type image/pjpeg.”

The latest development milestone of Google Chrome is available for download here.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).