Just about a year after Google launched the first version of Chrome, the company released the first stable version of Chrome 3.0 today. According to Google, this release comes after 21 beta and 15 stable updates and 3,505 bugfixes. As a result, Chrome 3 isn’t just more stable than previous versions but also considerably faster. According to Google, Chrome’s JavaScript performance has improved 150% since the release of the first beta and by more than 25% since the last stable release. The new stable version will also feature Chrome’s new Safari-like New Tab page, an improved Omnibox and better HTML5 capabilities, as well as support for Chrome themes.
Because Google releases Chrome on three different tracks (stable, beta, and the cutting-edge dev channel), none of these features in Chrome 3.0 come as a surprise, but it’s nice to see that Google has finally felt confident in making the 3.0 series the stable mainstream release. Some of us here at RWW have been using the dev channel series with extensions and themes for quite a while already and even this channel feels very stable at this point, even if the extension framework still needs some work.
While we wondered if Google was getting ready to make extensions a part of the stable series soon, it now turns out that this feature won’t arrive in the stable version of Chrome until version 4.0. If you feel adventurous, you could always switch to the dev channel.
