Every day the web becomes more powerful, allowing developers to create the next generation of beautiful, immersive experiences online. In our latest Chrome Beta release, we’ve made a few enhancements to ensure users have a smooth ride in these graphics-intensive applications. If you want to dig into the details, clip on your pocket protector and head over to the Chromium blog.

Just a week after its open-source brother Chromium had its logo summarily flattened, Chrome has followed suit. For now it's only available in the Developer channel, but presumably it will quickly percolate down to the Beta and Stable channels. There are some more images of the new logo after the break.

It was originally speculated that the Chromium logo change was to differentiate it from Chrome, but now it looks like Google might just have grown tired of the unbalanced, 3D-effect Chrome orb. The new geometric design is definitely easier on the eye, and it will be a lot more flexible too. It looks great on the Windows 7 taskbar, too.

We expect there'll be a statement from Google about the new logo later today, and we'll update this post when we find out more.

Gamers and other enthusiasts know the importance of keeping their video card's drivers current, but it's not something the vast majority of the computing public pays any attention to. If the computer is running OK, there's no need to update drivers, right?

As it turns out, there's a very good reason to update: your old driver might be causing your Web browser to crash excessively. That's what Google is reporting over at the Chromium blog. If you're surfing with Chrome and using an outdated driver, it could be wreaking havoc with Chrome's GPU acceleration and WebGL features.

Along with HTML5 support and tracking protection, hardware acceleration has become part of the 'geeky trinity' of features to trumpet in next-gen Web browsers. As developers tap deep into your computer's hardware to squeeze out additional performance gains, keeping your drivers fully updated -- especially for the graphics card which is handling all that accelerated rendering -- is going to be very, very important.

Okay, so we're not quite at the point where you're going to be playing the next Crysis sequel in your browser, but still -- the arrival of WebGL in Chrome's beta channel is kind of a big deal. Apart from being able to play around with cool demos like the ones offered up by Google in its official announcement, WebGL is another important step in bringing more desktop-like functionality to the Web.

In addition to cloud-y 3D support, hardware acceleration support is due to arrive at some point -- presumably before Chrome 9 gets pushed to the stable channel. Whether or not that will happen remains to be seen, but we'll know soon enough thanks to the six-week release cycle.

Check your Chrome wrench icon for the update notification, or hit About Google Chrome to force a check.

Anyone else up for some WebGL Quake action?

It's only available in the Dev and Canary builds of Chrome, and very few pages support it—for now. But if you want to get hardware acceleration running in Google's browser, it's just a simple command line switch away. More »