Late Wednesday, software giant Google released version 5.1.3533.1731 of its popular Google Earth program. The new version, a 15.9 megabyte download, adds the following new features:

- Improved Startup Time. The improvement is most noticeable when users launch the Earth application multiple times.
- Improved overall rendering performance. Changes include faster atmosphere rendering and using compressed textures whenever possible.
- Improved Road rendering Performance: Frame rate at places with dense road networks is three times faster than in previous releases.
- Improved memory utilization in the application.
- Significantly smoother frame-rate and less stuttering in the application compared to previous releases.
- Improved performance with large region based network link KML documents. Some of large KML documents are now processed and rendered at more than twice the speed of earlier releases.
- Improved KML document handling performance. Large regionated KML Image overlays are up to 80% faster than previous releases.
- Support for KML hint = moon or mars to switch to moon or mars based on kml document.
- Availability of one installer that installs both the Google Earth application and browser plugin.
- Desktop Application now works on Windows 7.
- Users can set the memory cache size up to 1024 MB now.

The new version requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later to install and run.