Google released an update of their web browser yesterday, bring Google Chrome to version 3. This release offers a number of improvements and new features, and pushes JavaScript performance even further into the stratosphere, keeping up the horse race between Chrome and Safari.

One improvement that has gone largely unnoticed is that 3.0 brings Web Workers to Chrome (of course it already had it in Google Gears fashion, however now it's in the standard, cross-browser form), so you can run the web worker benchmark I previously put up and see Chrome 3 blazing a path. I'll update the comparison charts to include this browser shortly.

This means that web apps using Web Workers for enhanced performance on multi-core machines, or more importantly for better GUI responsiveness, now function on Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, leaving just Internet Explorer and Opera as the hold outs.

Quiet Upgrades

I really appreciate how quietly Google updates their browser when you already have it installed. No user-disrupting fanfare or attempts to use the opportunity to push new toolbars or side products on you (which, I suspect, drives the frequent updates to many products. I uninstalled NoScript way back after having the update notice seemingly every other day for what seemed to be the most trivial extension possible, each update bringing you to the advertisement riddled website where it incidentally told you that they made some sort of irrelevant non-update. That was before the notorious battle between NoScript and Adblock, where the former again was motivated primarily by ad impressions). Of course this model gets much more debatable once changes include major functionality changes, or breaking changes, however as is it's a seamless way of delivering updates, where each version simply improves and adds to what is there.