Google Chrome 3

Google Chrome 3 has just been released from Beta testing and is now available to download here:

New features include support for HTML 5 - including the <video> tag - although there is still disagreement among providers as to which codecs this feature should employ, so I dont believe we are quite there with this part of the specification as yet. The recently released Firefox 3.5 includes support for HTML 5, however it will be a long time before we will see mainstream sites using some of the new HTML 5 features.

Other interesting updates include faster javascript rendering engine (150% speed increase is claimed), themes support, new customisable tabs page and some nice developer tools.

However, there is still missing some features of the google toolbar that one would have thought would be built in with the browser. There is not even an option to install the toolbar with chrome, so if you want to have page rank displayed and use your google toolbar bookmarks (which is based on google notes) then you will be disappointed.

In the pipeline is Google Chrome 4, which on first inspection looks very similar to version 3. There is the option to syncronise bookmarks with other instances of google chrome, but this does not have the portability of the google toolbar either, so in summary, until google creates a chrome version of the toolbar, it will not be my main browser of choice.