Google rolled out a stable release of Chrome 17 to browser users around the world Wednesday. Among other things, the upgrade begins to pre-render Web site pages based on what the user is typing in the browser's address bar, which Google has renamed the "omnibox."

"When you start typing in the omnibox and the URL auto-completes to a site you're very likely to visit, Chrome will pre-render the page, so it will appear faster -- sometimes, even instantly -- as soon as you hit Enter," wrote Chrome Software Engineer Noé Lutz in a company blog Wednesday.

Chrome 17 also features a number of security enhancements, including greater protection from malicious downloads, some of which even masquerade as free anti-virus products.

Google hopes the speed and security improvements to Chrome 17 -- together with this week's launch of Chrome as a browser for mobile devices running Android 4 -- will help the browser resume its former growth trajectory in the global browser market.

According to Net Applications, Google's browser market growth stalled in January when Chrome lost 0.17 percent share on the desktop -- even as Microsoft's Internet Explorer gained 1.1 percent and Mozilla's Firefox dropped 1 percent.

Security Enhancements

Chrome 17 analyzes the properties of each Web site that users visit to determine the likelihood of it containing phishing pages. Moreover, this analysis is conducted in the background on the user's own PC and without any information about the Web sites that users visit being shared with Google.

"Only if the page looks sufficiently suspicious will Chrome send the URL of that page back to Google for further analysis, and show a warning as appropriate," noted Chrome software engineer Niels Provos and product manager Ian Fette.

The safe browsing functionality built into Chrome 17 downloads a continuously-updated list of known phishing and malware...