Responding to Microsoft's release of its IE 9 RC, Google on Friday released the first beta of Chrome 10, touting the new version's faster JavaScript engine, new password sync features, and entirely revamped browser settings.

In the new beta release, Chrome's JavaScript engine V8 runs compute-intensive JavaScript applications even more quickly than before. In fact, this beta release sports a whopping 66% improvement on the V8 benchmark suite over Google's current stable release.

This release also includes a preliminary implementation of GPU-accelerated video. Users with capable graphics hardware should see a significant decrease in CPU usage. Google claims that in full screen mode, CPU usage may decrease by as much as 80%.

Users who enjoy the convenience of saving passwords in Chrome can synchronize their saved passwords across multiple computers, along with their bookmarks, preferences, themes, and extensions. For added security,users can choose to encrypt their synced passwords with their own secret sync passphrase.

Speaking of settings, Google has reworked the look and feel of the settings dialogs. Instead of opening in a separate window, they now open in a tab. More importantly, Google has added two new settings features that make it easy to customize Chrome. Firstly, if users can't remember where a particular pesky configuration setting is, they will be able to simply type its name into the search box to see the settings that match as theyr ype. Secondly, users can also now jump directly to most settings pages using their own dedicated URLs, without needing to navigate through a sequence of windows.