TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

Just over a year after first launching Chrome into the browser scene, Google has announced a new stable build in the 3.0 branch. Besides the usual range of bug fixes, Chrome 3.0 includes the promised support for themes, a more customizable New Tab page, an improved Omnibox (the equivalent to Firefox's Awesome Bar), better HTML5 capabilities, and a higher performing V8 engine.

Of course, none of this will come as a surprise if you've been using the cutting-edge dev builds, but it's still nice to see the 3.0 series become the stable mainstream release. According to Google, the release comes after 51 developer, 21 beta and 15 stable updates and 3,505 bug fixes in the past year -- which reportedly equates to 150% faster JavaScript performance since the first beta release and 25% since the last stable release.

Google also announced that the Mac version of Chrome -- currently only available for testing -- will be released by the year's end, and that extensions support won't arrive in the stable release of Chrome until version 4.0. If you feel adventurous, though, you could switch to the dev channel and test this feature out a bit early.