The Google Chrome developers have released a new version this week with enhanced support for extensions and—dare we say it—a proper extensions menu item so you can access Chrome's extension manager with ease.

Windows and Linux versions received some minor tweaking. The updates to the Mac version include fixing a slew of keyboard commands and updating the way secure HTTP sites are displayed, to more clearly alert the viewer that the site has a bad security certificate.

Windows/Mac/Linux: The official, actually-made-by-Google Chrome OS won't hit netbooks until late 2010, but you can try out a custom-built Linux distribution that's somewhat stripped down and puts Google's browser at the center of everything.

"Chrome OS" was built using SUSE Studio, a distribution and virtual appliance builder spawned from the OpenSUSE Linux distribution. It loads up with a Chrome icon, uses built-in webapp links to Google Calendar, Gmail, and other Google services as apps, and carries a copy of OpenOffice, just in case you need some straight-up desktop editing done. Most importantly, it holds the latest development copy of Google Chrome inside, along with a pre-built Flash plug-in.

Google Chrome: Want to keep track of what you've got open in Google Chrome? The experimental SessionSaver extension can save and load multi-tab, multi-window sessions and restore them with a few clicks.

Installing SessionSaver, or any Chrome extension, requires running Chrome's developer version, available using the Channel Changer tool, and adding --enable-extensions to the end of your Chrome launching shortcut, right after the chrome.exe bit. Once that's done, head to the link below and click on the first link to download and install the extension.

Using it is fairly simple. There's a save-icon-like button installed in Chrome's bottom status bar. Click on it to get load, save, and settings options, where you can save either just one window's tabs, every window's tabs, or load a previous session into your current tabs. Helpful for starting up multi-tab projects or saving your web progress when you're venturing into crash-prone territory.