When it was first launched in September last year, Google Chrome made a big splash and got a lot of users curious. Its promise of speed and stability, as well as its focus on web apps definitely caught my interest. As promising as Chrome was, however, Google’s first try at creating an Internet browser left a lot to be desired in terms of bugs and lack of features, specially when compared to more popular browsers like Firefox.

Since then, the company has worked to improve the program and now Chrome 2 is officially out of beta, free for download to the public as a stable release. According to their blog, among its new features are:

Improved New Tab Page: The most requested feature from users was the ability to remove thumbnails from the New Tab page. Now you can finally hide that embarrassing gossip blog from the Most Visited section.

Full Screen Mode: If you’ve ever given a presentation or watched a large video using Google Chrome, you might have wished you could use every last pixel on your screen for the content. Now you can hide the title bar and the rest of the browser window by hitting F11 or selecting the option in the Tools menu.

Form Autofill: Filling out your information in forms over and over again can be tedious. Form autofill helps by showing information you’ve previously entered into the same form fields automatically. If at any point you want to clear out your information, that’s easy to do from the Tools menu.

Increased Stability: Google Chrome is more stable than ever – we have fixed over 300 bugs that caused crashes since launch.

Increased Speed: Making the web faster continues to be our main area of focus. Thanks to a new version of WebKit and an update to our JavaScript engine, V8, interactive web pages will run even faster. We’ve also made sure that JavaScript keeps running fast even when you have lots of tabs open. Try opening a bunch of web applications and then running your favorite benchmark.

Previous tests report a 25-35% speed boost, which is quite impressive. Unfortunately, there isn’t much movement in the add-ons front, with only rudimentary support added for Grease Monkey. If you’ve already installed a previous version of Chrome, it will automatically be updated the next time you use it. If you haven’t had the chance to try it yet, you can download Google Chrome for Windows here. Beta versions are also available for Mac and Linux.