Continuing their rapid release, Google has made their twelfth release available, which is right on time for the debug of Chrome OS on the Chromebooks this month.

Regardless of the Chrome OS release, this baby comes with some interesting features nonetheless:

• Hardware accelerated 3D CSS
• New Safe Browsing protection against downloading malicious files
• Ability to delete Flash cookies from inside Chrome
• Launch Apps by name from the Omnibox
• Integrated Sync into new settings pages
• Improved screen reader support
• New warning when hitting Command-Q on Mac

If you are using Chrome, the update will come automatically, or can be triggered by going to the wrench menu and hit the about Chrome option. If you don't have Chrome installed, you can get it from Google's web site.

Google released the 11th release of Chrome already, bring lots of bug fixes, but also a couple of new features.

Google Chrome's rapid release schedule has caught attention from the competition. Just look at the second most web browser, Firefox, which has adopted a similar strategy. For instance Opera still sticks to a more traditional release schedule, but compared to their previous releases does appear to have increased their release schedule.

Chrome 11 comes with a lot of security fixes, but also includes some new features. The most noticeable is the speech input feature that allows you for instance to translate text with Google Translate by recording your voice and then hear the translated words. Oh and there's a new icon and logo too, which is way more flat than the previous one.

Existing Chrome users will get this update automatically, but it can also be triggered manually through the About Chrome dialog under the wrench menu (or on Apple in the Chrome menu). New users can download this release from Google Chrome's site.

Google continues its release train of their Chrome web browser with the next iteration, version 10. Don't think this is just some minor update, it still comes with some surprise features.

• New version of V8 - Crankshaft - which greatly improves javascript performance
• New settings pages that open in a tab, rather than a dialog box
• Improved security with malware reporting and disabling outdated plugins by default
• Sandboxed Adobe Flash on Windows
• Password sync as part of Chrome Sync now enabled by default
• GPU Accelerated Video
• Background WebApps
• webNavigation extension API

Chrome 10 is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Existing users will automatically get updated to this release. If it hasn't yet you can trigger it manually from the About page. New users can get the installer from Google's web site.

Continuing its rapid development, Google released the ninth version of their popular Chrome web browser, which is happily munching away market shares from the competition in the process.

In this release Chrome has added features previously tested in the development and beta channels to the stable channel, such as WebGL. WebGL brings hardware accelerated 3D graphics to the web browser. which require no additional software. To see it in action, go to the Chrome Experiments page and browse their gallery. Another new feature is Chrome Instant, which is like Google Instant Search, but now also works when typing in addresses. And of course the new Chrome Web Store, which has now fully opened in the US, adding a portal to advanced web apps, which promotes the web more onto your desktop.

Existing Chrome users will get updated automatically to this new release, if this doesn't happen (soon enough), go to the about Chrome window to have it manually check and install. Of course you can also install the latest release by downloading the full binary from Google's Chrome web site.

Google has launched their web app store for Chrome, building the first blocks of the road for Chrome OS and the future of the web.

We already knew that the Chrome Web Store was coming as it was revealed by Google some time ago now. Developer up till now have had the time to prepare their web apps to be included in Google's new project, which has the intention to deliver an online marketplace for apps, but also extensions and themes. Web apps are advanced interactive websites, so to speak. They may provide a wide-ranging set of features or focus on a single task like photo-editing or shopping. Installed web apps from the Chrome Web Store can be accessed through the shortcuts in Chrome’s New Tab page.

If you have Chrome installed you can access the Chrome Web Store directly. It contains already many apps, extensions, themes and of course user generated content like reviews and ratings.

The Chrome team has released the next version of their popular web browser, which sits tightly on the third place. For the time being Firefox is save, but with these rapid development cycles...

Google posted in their blog that Chrome 8.0 contains over 800 bug fixes, which should help fix annoyances of existing users, bring more stability and most important of all fixes several important security bugs as well. But there is also a new feature, namely a built in PDF viewer that is secured in Chrome’s sandbox. In the future (currently in the development channel for Windows) Adobe Flash Player will also be contained with a sandbox, offering an additional (and safer) level of security.

Existing users will get the update automatically, but it can also be triggered from the About screen. Don't have Chrome yet? Well go explore this nice web browser by the big search giant, it's a straightforward installation and available for Windows, Linux and Mac users.

Fulfilling their promised of more regular releases, Google released Chrome 7.0, bringing a whole slew of changes, regardless of the shorter timespan between releases.

Compared with the previous release Chrome 7.0 includes:

• Hundreds of bug fixes
• An updated HTML5 parser
• File API
• Directory upload via input tag

You may think, wow that's not that much, but consider that this was only six weeks of development. As you can see from the changelog hardware acceleration isn't included in this stable release, although it was present in the dev channel. The next release, Chrome 8.0, will most likely include hardware acceleration.

Existing users of Chrome are recommended to update to this release, as it continues stability and security fixes. If all goes well, Chrome will automatically update itself, but it can also be triggered by going to the about screen. The full download is available from Chrome's official web site.

A few big players in the web browser market are gearing up for their new releases, Chrome 7 and 8, Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 9, and of course Opera 10.70.

In the coming months I hope to do a massive benchmark on both Mac and Windows comparing these browsers using several different benchmarks for JavaScript, but also for hardware acceleration (as that is now the key component of next generation of browsers). Not only do the browsers differ so much in JavaScript performance, as they all use different engines, but hardware acceleration is becoming important as well for WebGL and HTML5 technologies such as the canvas.

For what it's worth I've run Peacekeeper on my iMac with the latest builds:

• Firefox 4.0 beta 6: 4516 (not yet using the new JS engine)
• Safari 5.0.2: 5905
• Opera 10.70 (9067): 6743
• Chrome Dev Channel (8.0.522.0): 8153

Can't go without a V8 Benchmark Suite - version 6:

• Firefox 4.0 beta 6: 1252 (not yet using the new JS engine)
• Safari 5.0.2: 3258
• Opera 10.70 (9067): 3610
• Chrome Dev Channel (8.0.522.0): 5439

Hardware Acceleration Stress Test

• Firefox 4.0 beta 6: 3 FPS (no hardware acceleration on Mac yet, planned for beta 7)
• Chrome Dev Channel (8.0.522.0): 6 FPS (no hardware acceleration on Mac yet, planned)
• Safari 5.0.2: 7 FPS (no hardware acceleration on Mac yet)
• Opera 10.70 (9067): 16 FPS (software acceleration?)

And just for the heck of it, an ICC profile test:

• Opera 10.70 (9067): None
• Firefox 4.0 Beta 6: ICCv2
• Safari 5.0.2: ICCv4
• Chrome Dev Channel (8.0.522.0): ICCv4

So which benchmarks would you recommend for the upcoming massive test?

The browser market shares differ greatly globally. Even on a per country base you'll see that each browser has more, or less, market share.

A common thing in each region is that Internet Explorer rules supreme, but StatCounter's numbers suggest that this last month Internet Explorer number one spot might be at risk as Firefox has been climbing closer and closer.

Google's Chrome is doing great too in Europe, similar to the US they've been growing and growing steadily. Differently though is that in Europe Opera and Safari struggle with each other to get that fourth spot. Safari probably gets most of its users from the Mac platform (let's be realistic that the Windows version, like QuickTime and iTunes, doesn't feel too well integrated). Surprisingly to me is that Opera in 2009 lost a lot of users and hasn't been growing much this year at all.

Do remember that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.