Google’s been really busy lately. They may be releasing “G-Drive,” a personal cloud storage service ala Dropbox. They have released a beta of the Chrome Web browser for Android. And, with all that, their developers have also been hard at work keeping Chrome on top of the Web browser hill.

Chrome 17, the latest and greatest, is fast. But, then Chrome has long been faster than its competition: Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, and Apple Safari. This latest update though has more than pure speed. It also comes with some new, useful features.

The best of these is security related. Besides such squashing potentially dangerous security bugs, Google now automatically runs checks on executable .exe and .msi files. If the program doesn’t match a built-in white list of OK programs, Chrome then automatically checks in with its Safe Browsing site to see if the Website you picked the program is known for of malicious downloads.

If the file isn’t from a known source, Chrome automatically sends the URL and IP of the host and other meta-data, such as the file’s hash and binary size, to Google. The file is then automatically classified using machine learning analysis and the reputation and trustworthiness of files previously seen from the same publisher and Web site. Google then sends the results back to Chrome, which warns you if you’re at risk.

Review: Chrome 17, faster than ever, more secure than ever. More >