The Chrome team has finally released Chrome 28 into the stable channel, the first release to support Blink, Google’s new rendering engine.

While Linux users have been using Chrome 28 for the past few weeks, Windows and Mac users are receiving the update today, marking the official release of version 28.

This a very significant release of Chrome, with the introduction of Chrome’s new web page rendering engine, Blink. Chrome has always used WebKit for page rendering, due to its speed and openness. However, for the past few years the Chrome team have been adding further functionality to WebKit for use in its own browser, such as the multi-process architecture. Earlier this year, it was decided that the Chrome team would fork WebKit to be able to produce their own rendering engine to further improve Chrome. By basing Blink off of WebKit, web pages and web applications do not need to function any differently, web developers should treat Blink like WebKit.

For a complete load down on Blink, check out our overview. Also, Google has put together a Q&A Hangout session which may answer some of your questions too.

Now that Blink is in Google Chrome, what benefits are we seeing over WebKit?

None at the moment.

The Chrome team has been hard at work forking WebKit over to the Blink codebase, so we won’t see any significant benefits in the short-term. Blink is all about the long-term plan for Chrome and the web platform.

However, with the initial release of Blink in Chrome 28, users should see faster page loads with the new Blink threaded HTML parser.

This release has now added Rich Notifications and the new Notification Centre on Windows, with Mac support coming soon.

Other changes include improvements to CSS and JavaScript benchmark performance improvements.

Chrome 28 also features a slew of security updates, making your browsing experience even more secure.

Block pop-unders in various scenarios.

Confusion setting up sign-in and sync.

Incorrect sync of NPAPI extension component

Resolved issue with Man-in-the-middle attack against HTTP in SSL and network sockets.

Improvements to GL textures and image rendering.

Extensions permissions confusion with interstitials.

Out-of-bounds read in XML parsing and text handling.

Remove the “viewsource” attribute on iframes.

Various fixes from internal audits, fuzzing, input handling, resource loading and other initiatives

Finally, Blink is at version 537.35 (which is the same version number as Webkit on Chrome 27) and V8 has been updated to version 3.18.5.8