Google boosts Chrome's speed for second release

Google has released Chrome 2, claiming the new version of its browser is much faster.

First launched last summer, Chrome holds about one per cent of the browser market share. The beta for Chrome 2 was released in March, and Google has spent the intervening months boosting its browser's speed and stability, said Darin Fisher of the Google Chrome Team in the official blog.

Google said it has fixed 300 bugs that were causing crashes to help boost stability, and also updated Chrome's version of WebKit and its JavaScript engine to make pages run faster. "Making the web faster continues to be our main area of focus," said Fisher.

Aside from the speed boost, Chrome 2 has a few new features. The tab page showing most visited sites can bow be edited. As Fisher noted: "Now you can finally hide that embarrassing gossip blog from the Most Visited section."

Chrome also now offers a full screen mode for watching videos or presentations, and now features a form auto fill function.

Google admitted that the changes weren't really that major despite the browser getting a new version number. "Finally, a note on version numbers: 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," he said.

Chrome users will be upgraded to the new version automatically, but it can also be downloaded here.

Click here to see which browser came out top in our four-way beta battle.