Google Chrome 8.0.552.215

The bottom line: Google Chrome 8 is not only stable to use, but comes with a full range of competitive features. It lacks some of the fine-tuning customizations in Firefox, but overall, users browsing with Chrome will find it a pleasant, fast, and standards-compliant experience.

Installation
Chrome's installation process is simple and straightforward. If you download from Google's Web site, it will ask you if you'd like to anonymously submit usage statistics to the company. This can be toggled even after the browser's installed by going to the "Wrench" preferences menu, choosing Options, then Under the Hood, and unchecking Help Make Chrome Better. Depending on your processor, the installation process should take less than 2 minutes.

Performance
Based on the open-source WebKit engine and Google's V8 JavaScript engine, Google Chrome debuted to much fanfare because of its rocketing rendering speeds. Two years down the line, that hasn't changed, and the stable version of Chrome remains one of the fastest stable browsers available. The less stable versions, with their more-recent improvements and bug fixes, are even faster.

Google claims that Chrome 6's JavaScript rendering is 10 times faster than when Chrome was first released in 2008. Historically, Chrome has been one of the fastest browsers available across multiple benchmarks, and that's not expected to change in version 8. Some are making unverified claims that Chrome 8 is two to three times as fast as Chrome 7.