Google has made a new version of its open-source browser available for download, reintroducing the Beta label. Chrome 1.0 itself debuted into Beta in September 2008, and was released to web in December of the past year. Subsequently, the Mountain-view search giant moved onward with the development of Chrome 2.0, and with the latest release started to address a larger audience than developers, opening up the testing milestone to the general public.

“Since we took the "beta" tag off Google Chrome in December, we've been updating two release channels: developer and stable. With our latest release, we're re-introducing the beta channel for some early feedback,” revealed Brian Rakowski, Google Chrome product manager.

Google is touting consistent gains in performance with the latest beta build of Chrome 2.0. In this context, the Mountain View search giant applauded major gains in terms of speed. “The best thing about this new beta is speed — it's 25% faster on our V8 benchmark and 35% faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to our original beta version,” Rakowski added.

With the new Beta, the public is also free to test drive some of the features that were added on top of Chrome, following the release of version 1.0. Google's own breed of open-source browser now brings to the table autofill, full page zoom and autoscroll (based on the latest iteration of the underlying WebKit). At the same time, Chrome Beta permits users to play around with the drag-and-drop functionality when it comes down to tabs.

“Getting on the beta channel means your version of Google Chrome will regularly get updated with new speed enhancements, features, and bug fixes before most users see them. We're doing our best to quickly churn out new features as they are available rather than saving them up for occasional major releases. Riding the beta channel is a great way to let us know about what's working and what's not, but don't be surprised to find some rough edges,” Rakowski said.

The latest release of Google Chrome is available for download here.