Last month's beta version of Chrome has become the new stable build, bringing a large JavaScript performance improvement to hundreds of millions of Chrome users. While it's a bit meaningless at this stage, this means the stable channel is now version 10, which first appeared at the end of 2010.

The main addition to this version is Crankshaft, a new version of the V8 JavaScript engine that results in 66% faster JavaScript performance -- as measured by Google's own V8 benchmark, anyway. Amongst other changes is the new-look tabbed settings page, sandboxed Adobe Flash for better security, and passwords are now synced with Chrome Sync. For complete release notes, check the Google Chrome Releases blog.

To update to the latest stable version of Chrome, simply close your browser and re-open it -- the update should be applied automatically. Alternatively, click the wrench icon and then About Google Chrome, which will check for the the latest update.

It occurred to us, after writing yesterday's list of Chrome keyboard shortcuts, that there was one glaring omission: bookmark shortcuts.

Not only does the Bookmark Bar take up valuable real estate, but no one really wants to click through folders of bookmarks to find what you're looking for.

Now, Firefox has 'Smart bookmarks', which lets you add a keyword to a bookmark. Chrome, however, only lets you assign keywords (and thus keyboard shortcuts) to search engines.

Fortunately, with a little bit of hacking, that doesn't matter.

With all the Chrome OS and Chrome Web Store hoopla today, a post over at the Chromium blog went mostly unnoticed -- and it's definitely noteworthy. Freshly baked in the Chromium snapshot builds and Google Chrome Canary is Crankshaft, an enhancement to Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine that has yielded some impressive gains.

Crankshaft is made up of four components:

• a runtime profiler for identifying code that uses a significant number of CPU cycles
• a base compiler for generating code more quickly
• an optimizing compiler which re-compiles code pinpointed by the profiler
• deoptimization mechanism that allows Crankshaft to recover from overly-optimistic code optimizations

Crankshaft offers improvements in both startup time and maximum performance, with Google noting gains of up to 12% on JavaScript-heavy pages. On Google's own V8 benchmark, Crankshaft helps Chrome post scores which are almost 50% higher than previous versions with V8 alone.

...And for those of you wondering when Chrome was going to hit version ten, you've got your answer. It's already happened to the Canary build -- so hit your wrench menu > About Google Chrome and restart to update yourself to Chrome X! There's not much new that you'll notice right off the bat, with the exception of a selectable Instant option and experimental geolocation features in about:flags.