Google Chrome 5.0 Stable for Windows, Mac, Linux

Google’s Chrome team May 24 released stable builds loaded with HTML5 utilities for Chrome 5.0 for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The new version comes just three weeks after the company unveiled what it called its fastest beta to date for the web browser.

Speed improvements

Google Chrome 5.0 sports improved JavaScript performance by 213 percent for the V8 benchmark and 305 percent for the SunSpider benchmark since Chrome’s first beta from September 2008.

Google’s engineers tested the Chrome speed improvements in a frame-per-second test involving potatoes in graters, lightning and the speed of sound. Users may also see screenshots of Chrome for Windows, Mac and Linux here.

Consistent with Google’s adherence to HTML5, Chrome 5.0 leverages HTML5-based geolocation APIs, which users may test in Google Maps and in the drag-and-drop for files feature in Gmail. The Chrome bookmark manager has also been spruced up with HTML5, which users can see here.

Chrome 5.0 will let users synchronise not only bookmarks across several computers but also browser preferences such as themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, languages and settings for page zoom.

This is a big timesaver for users who need to access their web content from various and sundry computers from work and home.

Google is also working on integrating Adobe Flash Player into Chrome, a feature that will be ready to go with the full release of Flash Player 10.1.

The 70 million-plus existing Chrome users will be automatically updated to Chrome 5.0 soon, but they and users may download it here now.

Spotlight on Chrome

Google has been shining the spotlight brighter on Chrome of late. The company is aggressively advertising the browser, which now commands 6.7 market share worldwide, on the New York Times and ESPN.com.

Chrome is also the main attraction for the forthcoming Chrome Web Store, Google’s gallery for web applications.

The Web Store, merely a Google experiment now, borrows the concept from mobile app stores such as the Apple App Store and the Android Market.

Meanwhile, check out how Chrome is dinging Mozilla’s Firefox on ReadWriteWeb here.