14 DAY TRIAL // With the developer releases now sporting a 4.0 suffix, the Chrome 2.0 stable release was really starting to look long in the tooth. And, despite the fact that Google says version numbers don't really mean that much for the Chrome team, the new 3.0 version, which finally made it as a stable release, does bring some significant improvements and new features. With a good mix of 'work' and 'play', the latest Google Chrome now includes Themes support, a redesigned New Tab page, an improved Omnibox and, as usual, it's also a lot faster than the retired version.
“At Google Chrome's first birthday just two weeks ago, we looked forward to an action-packed year for the browser and the web. Thanks to a full year of great feedback from our users, we're kicking off our second year of Google Chrome with a brand new stable release. This release comes hot on the heels of 51 developer, 21 beta and 15 stable updates and 3,505 bugfixes in the past year,” Anthony Laforge, Google Chrome's program manager, wrote.
If you've been keeping up with the beta releases there isn't anything new here but for the regular user it makes for a significant update. One of the first things you may notice is the redesigned New Tab page with a much cleaner and organized look. By default it has eight web page thumbnails and a bookmark bar but everything on the page can now be customized: you can remove any section, rearrange the thumbnails and even pin them so they don't change.
The other major functionality update is the improved Omnibox, the address bar–search box hybrid Google Chrome uses. The new version brings an optimized drop-down menu and adds icons to set apart bookmarks, visited sites, searches and suggested sites.
The new Chrome also packs some compelling improvements under the hood, with a much faster V8 JavaScript engine. Google says it's a 150 percent improvement over the very first beta release and a 25 percent improvement over the previous stable version. HTML 5 support has finally trickled down to the stable branch and, thought it's far from complete, Chrome can now handle some of the most important features in the proposed HTML 5 standard, like the <video>, <audio> and <canvas> elements.
Some users have been getting bored with the same blue theme used for over a year now so they should enjoy the brand-new Theme Gallery, which is now enabled for the stable release as well allowing users to customize the look of the browsers with a growing number of themes. It's not a full-blown theming engine – more like Personas for Firefox – but since Chrome already has one of the best GUIs in the market it's doubtful many will complain.