Google quietly updated its web browser to v0.3 earlier today. According to Google, the new release fixes several “top” bugs, increases the software’s performance, and patches security problems. The software is available in 42 languages.

Chrome launched as v0.2 and made a huge impact almost months ago. Interest in the browser has somewhat faded since then. According to Net Applications, Chrome currently has a market share of about 0.7%, down from more than 1% in early September. While it has made an overall positive impression on the media, the browser is far from complete. One major update was rolled out today.

The new version addresses a pop-up spoofing vulnerability, enables touchpad scrolling, promises more performance and reliability for Flash, Silverlight, Quicktime and Windows Media plug-in, fixes a “Chrome has crashed” message when closing a tab with an Acrobat 9 PDF and works much better with web proxies now. Also, Chrome no longer stores data from secure web sites.

Additionally, the New tab, New window, and New incognito window options were moved from the ‘Control the current page’ menu to the ‘Customize and control Google Chrome’ (wrench) menu. A ‘New incognito window’ now always opens a new window. The spell checker works on text input fields and underlines misspelled words and users can now add words to the spell check dictionary. Downloaded executable files are downloaded to “unconfirmed_*.download” files and will only be converted to a regular file if a user clicks Save. Unconfirmed downloads will be deleted when Chrome exits.

With the transition to version 0.3.154.9, Google has also modified the information about Chrome within the browser. While the companied mentioned before that Chrome uses the Apple WebKit 525.13, Google now simply states that the browser is made possible by the Chromium project.

Chrome users can update the software simply by clicking the update button in the “About” window of Chrome (which can be found in the ‘wrench’ menu of the browser). Google said that Chrome browser should update automatically over the next few days.

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