Google's new browser "Chrome"

Well, last night I downloaded the new web browser from the tech titan, Google. They call it Chrome. It has a very sleek interface that blends well with the stylings of Vista. I had no trouble downloading it and installing was a breeze. The install even pulled over all of my firefox setings, bookmarks, saved passwords and history. It has been pretty smooth sailing so far. I have noticed a few little glitches though, which is to be expected with a beta product (did I mention this is a beta product?). I had no trouble scrolling down on the webpage using my wheel mouse, but the scrolling up was not working. A minor detail that I'm sure they already have worked out and ready for the next release. There have been some questions about security, but theoretically, it should be more secure than other browsers since each of the tabs is handled by it's own processor thread rather than sharing threads. But, there have been some hackers security experts that have found ways to run malicious code against it to force the browser to run executables without prompting the user.

But, don't get down on it just yet. Chrome has enough eyecandy for the whole class (sorry, just flashed back to 6th grade english class). The default home page is a list of your history with links, your most recent added bookmarks, and delicious thumbnails of your most visited sites. The browser even has a sneaky little incognito mode of opening links which does not write to the browser history. So your daily visits to "The Onion" can be kept from prying eyes.

Chrome's tab browsing is the best of any browser yet. You can drag tabs around, even to new windows to group them together. And as I eluded to before, each tab runs in it's own thread. What that means is that each tab is basically it's own application. So, if a tab freezes up, you can kill it without killing your entire browser session.

If you are in to boring slow and long comic book style writing (and who isn't), here is a link to just such an online document explaining their new open source browser http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome.

If you want to take it for a test drive yourself, it can be found at http://www.google.com/chrome.

All in all, I like it. I think there are definitely some bugs to be worked out, but that is what a beta product is, buggy. I can't wait for the next iteration to see the final release version. I will be using the beta until then.