Google is celebrating Chrome's second birthday with the release of Google Chrome 6 stable and by looking back at what changed over time. Interestingly, some things have changed, quite dramatically, yet many have remained the same.

Google introduced Chrome with the idea that the web was no longer about web pages, it was about applications. As such, a browser was needed that would serve more as a platform for the apps rather than try to do everything itself. Google, of course, was one of the main drivers of the shift towards web apps.

"Looking back today on Chrome’s second anniversary, it’s amazing to see how much has changed in just a short time," Brian Rakowski, Product Manager at Google, wrote.

"In August 2008, JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn’t yet an essential feature in modern browsers, and the idea of a sandboxed, multi-process browser was only a research project. All browsers have come a long way in the last two years and the web has become much more fun and useful," he added.

When it launched, Chrome was definitely a new face. With a radical new UI paradigm, Google's trademark minimalism and blistering speed, it upped the ante for web browsers.

Since then, the browser market became a lot more interesting. Firefox got faster and better and the upcoming Firefox 4 promises to be one of the biggest updates to date.

Internet Explorer 9 is also shaping up to be a major upgrade over IE 8, itself the best release so far. And Opera continues to offer a solid, if under-appreciated product.

But Google is not sitting still either. Since launch, JavaScript speed has increased three times in Chrome. The browser managed to keep the speed crown it got at launch, though Opera has been putting up a great fight recently.

The Google Chrome UI, which has inspired quite a few of the other browsers, most notably Firefox 4, has been updated and polished and is now lighter than ever.

And Google is not done yet. In a couple of months, Chrome OS, an operating system based entirely on the browser, is launching. Along with it, Google is introducing the Chrome Web Store, an app store for the web.