Google this week released a stable version of its Chrome browser that incorporates warnings about malicious downloads, better control over how you're tracked online, and improved graphics capabilities.

Google this week released a stable version of its Chrome browser that incorporates warnings about malicious downloads, better control over how you're tracked online, and improved graphics capabilities.

Chrome users will get the latest version of Chrome 12 as an automatic download in the coming days.

What does it include? First up, Google has enhanced its "Safe Browsing" mode to provide warnings about malicious downloads into the Chrome browser. If you try to download something suspicious, Chrome will display a warning ("This file appears to be malicious. Are you sure you want to continue?") with the option to Discard or Save.

To determine if a download is questionable, Google will display the warning for any download URL that appears on the latest list of malicious Web sites published by the Safe Browsing API. The feature was with a small subset of users on the Chrome development release channel.

Another feature making the leap from the dev channel to a stable version is easier management of local shared objects (LSOs), or "Flash cookies." Last month, , which includes enhanced privacy controls for how your activity is tracked online via the major browsers.

"Cookies" are little bits of data collected about your Internet activity. They can be usefullike remembering passwords and settings on sites that you surf to frequentlybut there are also concerns about targeted advertising and how much data is really collected. Web cookies can be deleted, but management of cookies inside products like Flash are a bit more complex. With Flash Player 10.3, however, users on Chrome 12 (as well as Firefox 4 and IE 8 and 9) can wipe the data stored by installed browser plugins.

"We've worked closely with Adobe to integrate Flash LSO deletion directly into Chrome, making it easier for you to manage your online privacy," Google said in a blog post.

Finally, this Chrome release promises improved graphics capabilities, including support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, which Google said "means you'll get a snazzier experience in some Web pages and web apps that choose to implement 3D effects." You can see it in action via this Chrome Experiment on Windows Vista or Mac OS X 10.6 or above.

This release also includes some security fixes, which resulted in almost $10,000 in bug bounties.

"We'd ... like to call particular attention to Sergey Glazunov's $3133.7 reward," Google said in a separate blog post. "Although the linked bug is not of critical severity, it was accompanied by a beautiful chain of lesser severity bugs which demonstrated critical impact. It deserves a more detailed write-up at a later date."