Google “Releases Chrome 2”

After about 8 months of work, Google has “released Chrome 2” to the general public. Technically, this just means they moved the version of Chrome in the beta channel up to the stable channel. “We’re referring to this as Chrome 2, but that’s mainly a metric to help us keep track of changes internally. We don’t give too much weight to version numbers and will continue to roll out useful updates as often as possible.” There’s lots of decent goodies in Chrome 2.

A big focus for the Chrome 2.x branch has been stability and speed. The have fixed over 300 bugs that caused crashes since launch. In addition, they’ve improved performance of the browser not only by moving to a new version of the Webkit rendering engine, but also by updating V8, Chrome’s JavaScript rendering engine.

V8 has been tweaked to deliver a 30% performance improvement, but it’s important to note that that figure comes from the V8 Benchmark Suite, V8’s own benchmark suite. They also worked on V8’s scalability, making sure that even when you have countless JavaScript-heavy pages open, performance will remain good.

Thee are also a bunch of user-visible changes, such as a revised “new tab” page which allows you to remove thumbnails from the speed dial function (so I can finally remove that link to Greatponies.com). There’s also a new full-screen function using the F11 key, and very pretty finally: form autofill.

Product Manager Brian Rakowski details the new features in this video:

Because of Chrome’s successful auto-update feature, users of Chrome will automatically be updated to this latest version. If you don’t yet have Chrome, you can download it from Google.

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