According to a blog post by Google Product Manager Jeff Chang, and Product Marketing Manager Min Li Chan, in the spirit of the lunar new year, Google is kicking off the Year of the Rabbit with a slew of enhancements in the Chrome beta channel, including a substantial improvement in JavaScript speed, new password sync features, and entirely revamped browser settings.

I’m a fan of the Google Chrome browser, but it does have one glaring drawback: unlike Safari and Firefox, it isn’t supported by Netflix Watch Instantly, which means that if I want to watch a movie, I have to switch browsers. It turns out this problem isn’t with Chrome or Silverlight, but with Netflix, and a simple bit of code enables Watch Instantly on Chrome.

Back in October when Mac users first saw Google’s Chrome browser on their platform, there was plenty of excitement. However, not long after, it sunk in that Chrome for Mac was missing many of the features that the Windows users loved about it. In the most recent update from Google for the beta version of the browser, many of these features are now available.

This week, Google announced an official version of Google Chrome, a result of the Chromium project, at the Web 2.0 Summit in California. What that means is that outside of nightly developer builds, this version—build 4.0.223.8—is the first official release build of the software. While the Windows version has been official and crushing it for quite some time now, Google certainly took their time on the Mac side.

For those of you eagerly awaiting Google’s Chrome—a new, extremely popular browser for Windows—to make its way to the Mac or Linux, hold on. According to Brian Rakowski, Chrome’s product manager, he expects and hopes that the Mac and Linux version will be ready by half way through this year. Now that Chrome for Windows has been updated to contain almost all of the features requested (such as extensions), they can focus their energy on expanding it.

When Google Chrome Beta 1 was released earlier this week, Mac users were shocked by the fact that it was Windows-only. Google, with a reputation for creating their apps for all platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux), had not yet released a Mac version of their web browser. In an interview with BoomTown’s Kara Swisher, Sergey Brin said “I know, I know, it’s embarrassing.” He was unable to provide a date for the release of the Mac OS X version of Chrome, but did mention he is “asking every day” and hopes “it’ll be a matter of months.”

More after the break.