Google Chrome 8 Stable Lands, Chrome 9 Beta Next, Chromium 10 Already Here

As expected, Google Chrome 8 has reached the stable phase and has been pushed as an update to all stable channel users. The new release comes with a number of new features but nothing revolutionary from Chrome 7.

With that out of the way, the Chrome team wasted no time in getting Chromium 10 out the door. There's a very good reason for that, Google Chrome 9 is now heading to the beta stage.

The big release, Google Chrome 8, is launching with its most significant feature still missing in action. The Chrome Web Store hasn't been launched along with the new stable version, as speculated. This would explain why Google is not really making any fuss about the new release, not even a post on the Chrome blog.

The Web Store should be coming soon, next week perhaps. Until then, you can enjoy the built-in sandboxed PDF viewer, now enabled by default, and some of the new experimental features in about:flags.

Beta channel users are stuck with Google Chrome 8 for a while longer, until the first Chrome 9 beta lands, at most, a couple of weeks from now. In fact, the team has already started working on making Google Chrome 9.0.597.x ready for a beta release.

The rest of the team is plowing ahead and, since the active development phase of Chrome 9 is over, Chrome's open-source twin has gotten a symbolic update.

Chromium 10 is here, signaling the start of Chrome 10's development. Since Chrome 9 will be coming mid-January, Chrome 10 should be landing by early March 2011.

It's too early to know what Google has planned for Chrome 10, but one thing you can count on is better hardware acceleration. The team has been working on getting the GPU to do as much work as possible for several months now but it looks like we'll have to wait until next year to see hardware acceleration for every stage of the rendering process as support for "GPU Accelerated Compositing" is now an experiment Chromium 10.