Google Chrome, the hot new web browser from Google has officially left its ‘beta’ status behind with the official release of Google Chrome 1.0. The Google boys have no doubt been putting in work to have gotten this thing out of beta so fast.

Here’s what the Google Blog had to say about it:

Since we first released Google Chrome, the development team has been hard at work improving the stability and overall performance of the browser. In just 100 days, we have reached more than 10 million active users around the world (on all seven continents, no less) and released 14 updates to the product. We’re excited to announce that with today’s fifteenth release we are taking off the “beta” label!

Google Chrome is a better browser today thanks to the many users who sent their feedback and the many more who enabled automatic crash reports, helping us rapidly diagnose and fix issues.

As someone who used the very first beta version of Chrome, I can tell you that Chrome has definitely come a long way fast. The bugs it had initially were taken care of practically within a week of the first release.

Here’s some of the improvements you’ll find in Chrome 1.0:

Better stability and performance of plug-ins (particularly video). Video and audio glitches were among the most common bugs fixed during the beta period. If you had problems watching videos with Google Chrome in the past, you should be pleasantly surprised with the performance now.

Even more speed. Google Chrome starts up fast, loads pages quickly, and just keeps getting faster. Since the first beta, the V8 JavaScript engine runs 1.4 times faster on the SunSpider benchmark and 1.5 times faster on the V8 benchmark — and there is more speed to come.

Bookmark manager and privacy controls. We heard you! Better bookmark features were a top request from our users. It’s now easier to switch between another browser and Google Chrome with the bookmark import and export features, and we added a new simple way to manage large numbers of bookmarks, too. We also wanted to make it even easier for you to control your browsing data, so all of the features in Google Chrome which affect user privacy are now grouped in one place with detailed explanations for each one.

Google continues to amaze with their genius and their dedication to putting out a quality product. Think about how long Microsoft has been working on Internet Explorer, and yet it remains a terrible piece of software. Google did in 100 days what Microsoft has been working on for close to a decade.

Nicely done.

If you haven’t yet tried out Google’s open source web browser called ‘Chrome‘ — you really should. Like everything else Google does, Chrome is pretty amazing. The first version that came out was a little buggy, but it has improved dramatically over the last couple of months.

One of the biggest criticisms of Chrome for me is its lack of a bookmark manager. These days a bookmark manager is essential and a lack of one is pretty much a non-starter for many web heads.

Thankfully, Google listened and have now released a bookmark manager with the latest update to Chrome beta. I haven’t really had a chance to play around with it yet, but I’ll post my findings in the coming days.