14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome 26 has hit the stable channel. It's a bit surprising actually, since Chrome 26 has only been in the beta channel for a month. Chrome releases usually spend six weeks in each channel before graduating.
Perhaps the fast cycle can be explained by the short list of new features, though this list is usually short.
The only notable new feature is the spell checker which has gotten a big boost, particularly thanks to Google's cloud spell checker, the same one used in Docs and Search.
If you enable the "Ask Google for suggestions" feature, Chrome will use Google's online spell checking engine which comes with advanced features such as grammar and homonym checking.
Google uses machine learning technology for the online checker and since it has the entire web indexed, it's almost never wrong and very rarely misses a mistake.
The new spell checker can understand context, it knows whether you wanted to use 'ad' or 'add' and will offer suggestions accordingly. If you've used Docs before you'll know how powerful it is, if you haven't, you'll find out soon enough.
The only caveat is that, obviously, for it to work everything you type has to be sent to Google's servers. Google doesn't store any of this or uses it any way except to check your spelling, but if you don't trust Google, this could be an issue.
Even if you don't enable the cloud spell checker, you can still benefit the addition of beefed up dictionaries for all languages as well as support for Korean, Tamil and Albanian.
What's more, your custom dictionary can now be synced between browsers so you won't have to add words you commonly use more than once. You can also edit the dictionary to remove words you no longer use or manually add a batch of them.