Google puts Chrome 2 out on final release

Google claims that Chrome is now much more stable

Google has released the final code for the second version of its Chrome browser, eight months after the official launch.

Chrome 2 comes with a claimed 30 per cent speed boost, thanks to the revised V8 JavaScript engine that processes downloads from multiple pages and allocates resources to most used items.

"Web applications are becoming more complex," wrote Google software engineers Mads Ager and Kasper Lund on the Chromium blog.

"An increased number of objects puts additional stress on the memory management system of the JavaScript engine, which has to scale to deal efficiently with object allocation and reclamation. If engines do not scale to handle large object heaps, performance will suffer when running large web applications."

More cosmetic changes include the ability to run the browser in full screen mode, an auto-fill function for remembering form information, and a new way to edit the opening screen which displays the browser's most visited sites.

"It's useful if you end up with a site in there that you'd rather not admit to visiting quite as often as you actually do," said Google Chrome product manager Brian Rakowski.

Google also claimed that the browser is now much more stable, as more than 300 bugs in the system had been fixed since launch.

Existing Chrome users will be updated "very soon", Rakowski said on the Google Chrome blog, and updates will be pushed out regularly in the future.