This is probably old news by now but Google released their Chrome browser. I downloaded it today and gave it a whirl and the initial impressions are good.

I love the minimalistic interface, it’s something Microsoft does well, Mozilla does so so and Apple does great. Google however perfected it. I do have a problem with “Home” button being an option to check in order to appear on the toolbar. I thought that was kind of stupid, there was no other way to access Home unless you opened a new tab. Since your bookmarks are accessed via Home I kind of needed it to be easily accessible. Turning it on solved my problems.

Edit: Bookmark bar can be enabled as well, and it looks pretty sweet. No RSS live update though, but that’s not a big problem and can be added.

It doesn’t have the best extensions either. Actually there are none at the moment. That is expected, as the browser is still in beta stage. Hopefully developers catch on soon. There is a big problem though, it uses Apple WebKit. All of your favorite Firefox extensions will need to be recompiled with slight changes to work on Chrome. I wish they had kept the architecture the same.

My favorite thing about Chrome is its separate processes for each tab you open. Albeit it is also a problem as people reports larger than normal memory footprint is needed for all the tabs. As the software is still in beta stage, I’m sure it will be patched in time.

PS: You don’t have to enable the whole big brother stats sending feature in Chrome. So all of that Google stealing my data paranoia can be discarded. They track what you do in all of the Google Apps as well as the standard search engine anyways. Nobody’s lost their credit card numbers due to Google yet, so I don’t expect it to ever happen. Just turn it off if you really cared about this.

All in all, a very good browser. Rendering is perfect and even faster than Mozilla’s Gecko. If and when extensions (*ahem* Adblock *ahem*) become available, I may just switch to it full time.

google.com