Chrome users who appreciate having the latest and greatest things (and doesn’t that describe every Chrome user?) will be pleased to know that version 8 of Google’s Web browser has debuted in stable form.  Version 8.0.552.215 was announced earlier this afternoon, to be exact.

Fair warning: don’t expect this new release to revolutionize your online experience.  The biggest single change the average user is likely to notice appears to be the integration of the PDF viewer we’ve been following since mid-June.

Quite a lot has been altered under the hood, however.  A post on the Google Chrome Releases blog noted that Chrome 8 benefits from "over 800 bug fixes and stability improvements," so users are sure to be much better off.

More than a few independent researchers are better off thanks to Chrome 8, too, in the sense that Google’s bug bounty program continued to achieve results.  The blog post listed five different problems people were paid $500 or $1,000 for discovering.

The post stated, as well, "We’d also like to extend thanks to Sergey Glazunov and Marc Schoenefeld for finding bugs during the development cycle such that they never reached a stable build."

Now, in the tradition of looking forward to the next big thing, the countdown to Chrome 9 begins.