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Google has launched Chrome 3, as the company announces ambitious plans to almost double its market share in the next twelve months.

Chrome 3 has been in the beta channel for some months, but has now been promoted to Google's stable development channel, meaning the company believes it's bug free and ready for mainstream use.

The search giant claims Chrome 3 is 25% faster at rendering JavaScript intensive pages than Chrome 2, and 150% faster than the original Chrome which made its surprise appearance just over a year ago.

Cosmetic changes include a cleaner tabs page, showing eight frequently visited pages rather than nine. These can be dragged and dropped into whatever order the user likes, and also pinned to the tabs page so favourite sites don't disappear just because they haven't been visited in a few days.

Those with a keen eye will also notice new icons distinguishing between searches, sites and bookmarks when your search the Omnibox.

There's also support for some of the new features found in HTML 5, particularly the "video" tag. Support for audio and video tags allows browsers to run this content natively, without needing to install separate plug-ins - just as we do with images.

However, the browser makers have been unable to agree on which codecs should be natively supported within the HTML 5 spec, leaving them to add this support to their browsers independently.

The latest version of the browser arrives as Google begins to target a larger chunk of the browser market: "If at the two-year birthday we're not at least 5% of the market, I will be exceptionally disappointed," says Linus Upson, Chrome engineering director. "And if at the three-year birthday we're not at 10%, I will be exceptionally disappointed."

Just to put the size of the task into context, the latest figures from analysis firm Net Applications claim Chrome took only 3% of the browser market during August. However, the company has just signed a deal with Sony to install Chrome on all new VAIO laptops, which will significantly bolster its presence.