While themes aren't exactly all about productivity, strictly speaking, it never hurts to spice things up a little bit and make your workspace a little friendlier. To that end, Google Chrome's new Theme gallery adds a little spice to your Chrome installation.

You'll need to be using Google Chrome 3 to install any of the themes, and doing so is as simple as clicking the Apply theme button for any of the visible themes. We've verified the themes as working on both Windows and OS X, and presumably they should be working just fine on Linux, as well. Take a closer look at some of the themes in the gallery below, or just hit up the new gallery and try them out yourself.

The latest developer builds of Google Chrome enable extensions by default, add support for skins, and even improve compatibility with Windows 7.

If you aren't using the developer releases of Chrome, you'll still need to download the Channel Chooser and switch to the development stream, but you won't have to mess around with command-line parameters anymore—extensions have been enabled by default. This means you'll be able to install themes for the browser, and while there are only two themes to choose from at the moment, the theme specifications have been published and there is likely to be an explosion of new skins released very soon.

The other noteworthy fix, although not mentioned in the linked article, is that Google Chrome's "Application" shortcuts will now show up as separate taskbar items in Windows 7, a very helpful change for those of us that use them extensively.