Google continues its fast pace to introduce new browser versions. Version 5 has left its beta stage for Windows, Mac and Linux earlier today, exactly five months after the release of Chrome 4. The new Chrome is the fastest Chrome to date, and considerably faster than any other available browser today, as long as users do not ask for SVG and HTML5 applications that benefit from hardware acceleration.

There is more big news with today’s release of Chrome 5 as this version is the first stable Chrome version for Mac and Linux after Google announced the beta versions on February 11 of this year. Chrome 5 is a major milestone for Google with an armada of new features, including bookmark and preferences cloud synchronization, an updated extensions manager as well as several HTML5 features such as Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, file drag-and-drop (for example in Gmail) and an revision of the bookmark manager.

What is missing from this release is the Adobe Flash Player integration, which was included in recent beta versions of Chrome. Google said that Flash is “not included by default in today’s stable release,” but the company is expected to provide this feature with the release of the Flash Player 10.1.

Meanwhile, the new beta version is number 6, which is still provided under the developer “Chromium” label and currently stands at version 6.0.416.0. There are no obvious changes over version 5, even if it seems that Chromium 6 is about 5 to 10% faster than Chrome 5. Google currently has a speed advantage over every other stable browser (Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera) as far as JavaScript is concerned. Microsoft is still trailing Google significantly in this discipline, with Google being about twice as fast in common Java Script benchmarks such as SunSpider. However, Microsoft’s IE9 (PP2) has the edge in running complex graphics with a new engine that shifts processing tasks to the GPU and supports many-core environments. Microsoft hopes that HTML5 will bring applications that are much richer in their content presentation and can take advantage of hardware acceleration to provide the same quality we are used to from traditional desktop applications.

Firefox follows Microsoft’s path with limited hardware acceleration being enabled in the upcoming Firefox 3.6.4 (planned release date: June 1), while Chrome 5 and 6 do not include hardware acceleration. Given that there are virtually no websites that require hardware acceleration today, that isn’t a huge issue, but it does not take much to see that a future version of Chrome will have to integrate hardware acceleration as well.

Google is automatically updating Chrome and no action is required on the user side. Chrome currently holds a market share of close to 7%, according to Net Applications.

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