Google claims 30 percent Chrome speed boost

Google has announced the latest beta of its Chrome browser, claiming it to be the fastest release yet.

The company said that the new release includes one of the "most significant speed and performance increases to date", and quoted benchmarking improvements using V8 and SunSpider of between 30 and 35 percent.

Much of this acceleration is down to improvements in the V8 JavaScript engine, the firm explained.

"Chrome's performance has improved by as much as 213 percent and 305 percent on these two benchmarks since our very first beta," said Mads Ager, a software engineer at Google, on the Chrome blog.

Other new features include the ability to synchronise web bookmarks and personal browsing preferences, such as themes and content settings.

Chrome has also had something of a HTML5 injection, and now offers geo-location APIs, an App Cache and web sockets. Adobe's Flash is integrated from the off.