Google officially released Chrome 12 this week, rolling the update out into the stable channel. Due to Chrome's tight six-week release cycle, there aren't a lot of major user-facing changes in the update. The new version brings a number of security and functionality improvements that will appeal to users. There are also some good bugfixes.

Google has extended Chrome's malware detection functionality so that it can proactively warn users when it detects that the user is trying to download a potentially malicious file.

Google has been working closely with Adobe to improve Flash integration in Chrome. In Chrome 12, there is now a user interface for managing Flash's local shared objects. You can access it by right-clicking an embedded Flash media element and selecting the global settings item from the context menu. In the dialog, you can delete Flash cookies and configure the policy for accepting them.

On the Web technologies front, one of the most significant additions in Chrome 12 is support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS transforms. It's important to note that 3D CSS transforms are entirely distinct from WebGL. The 3D CSS transforms offer a declarative approach to defining 3D effects on DOM elements, whereas WebGL provides JavaScript OpenGL bindings that can be used to do 3D drawing in a Canvas element. To test the new 3D CSS Transforms feature, you can check out a new demo that has been published on the Chrome Experiments gallery.

You can download Chrome from the product's website.