Google Chrome 3 Brings More Speed and Features to the Stable Release

Windows only: Chrome turned one year old just a couple weeks back, and as a belated celebration, the folks at Google have just pushed out a brand new stable release in the form of Google Chrome 3.

Those of you who haven't been eager to play on the bleeding edge of Chrome releases have a lot of nice improvements in store for them in Chrome 3, including:

• Speed Improvements: Chrome 3 is faster than any previous stable release on both the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks. (Google's calling it a 150% increase in Javascript performance since their first beta.) In the current Chrome 4 dev release, Chrome continues to outshine other browsers on most speed benchmarks.
• The New Tab Page: Again, this is only new to those of you who've been sticking to stable releases, but the new tab page is more customizable, allowing you to rearrange thumbnails via drag and drop and pin thumbnails you want to keep around permanently.
• Better Omnibox: Firefox has its awesome bar, Chrome has its omnibox. As of the stable Chrome 3 release, the omnibox adds contextual icons to help you see whether autocomplete results are suggest sites, searches, bookmarks, or sites from your history.
• HTML5: Google has been pushing the envelope with what developers can do with HTML5, the new standard set of tools in the next evolution of HTML (the backbone of web pages). In Chrome 3 stable, HTML5 is standard—meaning support for video, audio, and canvas tags that bring a rich web experience to your browser without the need for third-party plug-ins like Flash.
• Themes: We've highlighted a handful of the great new Google Chrome themes already, but now they're available to the stable channel users, as well.

Of course, none of this is all that exciting if you've been using the beta or dev channels for your Chrome updates, but if your workplace, for example, won't let you use anything but stable releases of software, the stable Chrome update is very welcome. Chrome 3 stable is a free download, Windows only.

(Note: Google continues its rather speedy version number jumping here—having dropped three "major" releases in just over a year. It may seem a little silly that it's now on the same version number as Firefox and looks like it'll easily beat Firefox to 4.0, but keep in mind that version numbers are largely arbitrary, so while Google may well hit Chrome 10 in another year or two, it has little bearing on how it compares to other browsers.)

Google Chrome [via Official Google Blog]