16 September 2009, 10:08

Google Chrome 3.0 released

The redesigned New Tab page in Chrome 3. Just over one year after Google's Chrome web browser was originally launched, Google has announced the release of Chrome version 3 which includes several bug fixes, improvements and new features.

According to a post on the Official Google Blog, JavaScript performance has improved by 150 per cent since the first beta and more than 25 per cent since the most recent stable release, thanks to updates to the V8 JavaScript engine. The release includes a newly redesigned New Tab page that can be changed to suit an individual users preferences and users can now customise the look and feel of the browser with built-in themes support. The "Omnibox" address bar now uses different icons to distinguish between actions like search, bookmarks and previously visited pages. Additionally, Chrome 3.0 features new built-in HTML 5 capabilities, such as the <audio> and <video> elements and Web Workers.

The latest stable release addresses a security issue related to untrusted content in RSS or Atom feeds that could allow an attacker to inject JavaScript into a target web site and a high risk cross-origin JavaScript vulnerability that violates the same-origin policy. Further details of the vulnerabilities, however, are currently being withheld until "a majority of users are up to date with the fix".

Google Chrome 3.0 is available to download in over 50 different Languages for Windows XP, SP2 and Vista. Users that currently have Chrome installed can use the built-in update function by clicking Tools, selecting About Google Chrome and clicking the Update button.

To date, Google has yet to release a stable version of Chrome for Linux and Mac OS X users. The latest developer channel (a.k.a. the Dev channel) release for Mac and Linux, Chrome 4.0.207.0, was released less than one week ago, fixing several bugs and adding a new defence for cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

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