Google announced on Tuesday the official release of Chrome 3, a new version of its WebKit-based open source Web browser. The new version introduces several noteworthy new features, including a faster JavaScript engine, a theme system, improvements to the Omnibox, and a redesigned New Tab page.

The Chrome Web browser was first launched with much fanfare a little over a year ago. According to Google, the performance of the browser's V8 JavaScript engine has increased by over 150 percent since the original version of Chrome was released. Thanks to Google's aggressive performance optimizations, V8 has zoomed past Mozilla's TraceMonkey JavaScript engine and now rivals Apple's speedy Nitro engine in our recent benchmarks.

Chrome is moving forward at an impressive pace with new features arriving at frequent intervals due to heavy incremental development. Google simultaneously provides stable, beta, and developer build channels, all of which are updated with a rolling release model. Chrome 3 has been undergoing extensive user testing through the beta channel and has now merely been pushed over to the stable channel so that it can be deployed to the broader audience of Chrome users.

We looked at the major features of Chrome 3 last month when we conducted hands-on testing of the beta and developer channel builds. The new theme system allows users to customize the browser's look and feel. A number of new styles are available for users to install from the Chrome theme gallery. The new start page allows users to pin or remove the recent page thumbnails. Chrome 3 also shines in the area of emerging standards as it brings support for several key HTML5 features such as the Video element.

In addition to the solid set of improvements that are included in Chrome 3, there are already a number of other compelling new features on the roadmap that are under active development. We recently looked at the Chrome extension system which is coming along nicely and allows users to enhance the browser in various ways. Bookmark synchronization is also a recent addition. These features are landing in the Chrome 4 builds that are available for testing from the developer channel.

Chrome has emerged as a serious contender in the browser market and it is slowly beginning to gain traction among users. According to analytics firm Net Applications, Chrome's marketshare rose from 1.52 percent in January to 2.84 percent in August with modest growth each month (nearly 7 percent of our visitors over the past 30 days have used Chrome). It has surpassed Opera and is not far behind Safari. The adoption rate could get a boost from distribution deals that Google is negotiating with hardware vendors.