Today, Google announced the release of a new beta version of Chrome, focusing on improving how page loading is handled, as well as security. 

In the seventeenth (17) major release of Google Chrome, pages will begin to render in the background as users type a URL into the omnibox (Chrome's special word for the address bar). If the URL will auto-complete to a site that the user is likely to visit, then Chrome will pre-render the page. Google says that, in some cases, people can expect to see webpages load instantly. 

On the security side of things, Chrome's Safe Browsing feature will now protect its users from more types of malware. The security feature will now check websites that require some sort of user interaction to install malware, where as before non-interactive methods were checked. 

To help protect you against malicious downloads, Chrome now includes expanded functionality to analyze executable files (such as “.exe” and “.msi” files) that you download. If a file you download is known to be bad, or is hosted on a website that hosts a relatively high percentage of malicious downloads, Chrome will warn you that the file appears to be malicious and that you should discard it.

The Chrome beta channel can be download here. Keep in mind that this is a beta release and bugs are to be expected. Let us know if you think sites are loading quicker under this release in the comments below!