Google revs up Chrome’s engines, brings Mac and Linux builds out of beta

Google's Chrome browser for Mac and Linux platforms officially graduated from beta to "stable" on May 26. Chrome 5.0 brings with it many new features and speed increases.

The new stable release for Mac and Linux enables users to synchronize bookmarks and browser preferences across multiple computers and platforms so consumers can feel at home no matter which machine they work on.

According to threatpost.com, the release also resolves "at least two ‘high risk' vulnerabilities and several security-related denial-of-service crashes."

"Our stable release also incorporates HTML5 features such as Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop," wrote Google on its Chrome blog on May 25.

"For a taste of HTML5's powerful features, try browsing through websites developed in HTML5 such as scribd.com, dragging and dropping attachments in Gmail, or by enabling the geolocation functionality in Google Maps. We've also given Chrome's bookmark manager a facelift with HTML5."

Chrome has been rapidly gaining new users since its introduction in September 2008. Most of those users seem to be swapping over from Firefox.

According to figures published by NetMarketShare in April, Chrome had a market share of around 6.73 percent, while rival browsers IE (59.95%) Firefox (24.59%), Safari (4.72%) and Opera (2.30%) joined Chrome in the list of top five most used browsers.

With the addition of more features and even more speed increases, Chrome is set to gain a larger portion of the market share in the coming months.

In case you were wondering just how fast Google Chrome is, this video explains it all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0&feature=player_embedded