Google recently announced that Chrome had been released out of beta, with the 1.0 version having been made available for download for the Windows operating system, while support for Linux and Mac OS X is still in the works, according to the Web giant.

The decision to take the open source web browser off beta came as a surprise to many, since Google has been known to keep their services in beta version for a long period of time, while Chrome 1.0 was rolled out only a few months after the tool was first launched in beta.

Google’s software application for organizing and editing digital photos Picasa was released out of beta only recently, although it was launched more than four years ago, while the company’s free webmail service Gmail is still in beta, even though it was introduced on April 1, 2004 and it has drawn tens of millions of users since then.

The release marks the fifteenth one for Google Chrome, the company having attempted to fix the bugs and the shortcomings impairing the browser through all the previous launches.

When it was first introduced at the beginning of September, reviewers found that it did not feature support for a full bookmark manager and RSS feeds, a problem which was solved by the company in the following roll outs.

Along with the 03.154.9 beta release at the end of October, Google fixed a security weakness that allowed malicious web sites to display their address in popup windows, a vulnerability that was reported by security researcher Liu Die Yu.

At that time, developers also enhanced the performance of plugins, including those used to view PDFs and Flash, given that users had complained that playing streaming Flash video sometimes consumed 100 percent of the CPU.

The intention of taking Chrome out of beta was first revealed last month, with Google Vice President Sundar Pichai having announced that the browser would be made available in full release in January 2009.

Now, Google Chrome will be taking on rivals such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox, although the former has been losing ground with Web surfers for a while.

Even so, in terms of market share, Explorer grabbed the bigger piece, with 69 percent, whereas Firefox holds 20 percent. As for Chrome, it has only managed to grip 1 percent market share so far.

Google has informed Tuesday that the first users who would be getting the 1.0 version of Chrome were the new ones, downloading the browser directly from the company, while on Thursday, some of the existing users got the update automatically.

Friday, the rest of the people who have already chosen Google Chrome as their browser, were set to receive the download, the number of these users amounting to 10 million according to Google.

Currently, the company is still working on features such as autofill for forms, native support for RSS feeds, along with the announced support for Linux and the operating system for Apple’s Macs.