Well.. Google wants a place in the browser market. Good luck.. :o) Think that IE, FF, Opera and Safari is enough for us, but will Googles giant success with search engines, video sites and software like Google Earth really help them on this market? Time will show.

I couldn’t resist downloading this new browser, so I went to http://www.google.com/chrome, and downloaded it.

My first impression: Whoa.. That’s a simple piece of software. It can do browsing, tabs and some other features, but that’s all. Not many features like it’s big competitors IE and FF, but that’s maybe why the whole browser feels so stable and nice to use.

Click the thumbnails for large pictures.

This is how the browser looks the first time you open it. You can view a mosaic of your most visited sites, do a search, and see your recent bookmarks. Chrome does automaticly import the bookmarks and browsing history from IE or FF.

As you may notice, the GUI is really slick, only the tabs in the top, an address bar, bookmark line, nothing more. There’s to buttons to the right of the adress bar where you can change your settings, or print the page, view page info etc.

When you delete your browsing data, you can choose in which period you want to delete.

Of course there is a developer tool, which lets you view page source etc. Each tab works as seperate processess, so you can easily see how much RAM every tab uses, and kill it, without killing the whole browser. This do also mean, that if a page in a tab crashes, the whole browser will not crash, but only the tab. In other browsers, if a tab page crashes, the whole browser will crash.

This is how it looks, when you begin visiting websites.

Every browser nowadays have tabbed browsing. So of course Chrome do also offer this. The tabs look really slick and confluents with the title of the window. This makes the whole browser look more robust, and I feel it’s very nice done.

Google Chrome do also have an awesome bar-like address bar. However, the “Type to search” text makes me thinking of a “search-application”, and not a webbrowser. This should be “Type to browse” or something.

Conclusion: When I first heard about Chrome, I was very sceptical about it, and I didn’t think that it would ever be used by someone. After trying it, I have changed my opinion. It’s really nice to browse using this browser, and I would recommend it for non-computer-nerds (like my grandmom - ha ha), but I would personally stay with IE.

Remember, this is just a beta of the browser, so it might change later on.