Internet Explorer 9 looks to make up much ground for poor previous outings by Microsoft browsers.  But even as it remedies slow performance and lacking standards, IE 9 is threatened by a slick set of super-fast browsers from smaller third parties who don't happen to be named Mozilla.

Among those challengers is Google's Chrome 10, which was just released in beta form last week.  Like IE 9 and Firefox 4, Chrome adds the much desire GPU hardware acceleration to Google's framework for the first time.  According to Google's blog on the release:

In full screen mode, CPU usage may decrease by as much as 80%!

Other major improvements have been made to Chrome's core Javascript engine.  Dubbed V8, the new engine offers 66 percent improvement in the company's V8 benchmark suite over the version found in the last stable build.

The new version of Chrome also introduced synced passwords, which allows you to share passwords across your (possibly) many computers.  The system includes passphrase protection, so your passwords are less likely to fall into the wrong hands.

Aside from speed, Chrome looks to hold an edge over IE 9 in HTML5 and CSS3 standards support.  Chrome 10's beta scores a mean 288 in the html5test.com (beta) metric, versus 255 in Mozilla Firefox 4 and 130 for IE 9 [source].

Google needs to put its best foot forward with Chrome as the company is going to use the browser as the basis of its upcoming operating system.  Built atop a base Linux kernel, the browser-centeric operating system should prove a unique competitor to Microsoft's Windows operating systems.

A Web Store was recently added to Chrome in preparation for the release of Chrome OS.  The web store allows developers to write web apps (games, music players, etc.) in languages like Javascript and PHP and sell them or offer them in ad-supported form.

Chrome 10 can be found here.