Google's new browser, Chrome (download), launched today after the explanatory comic (link) was accidentally posted yesterday afternoon. First impressions (after only an hour of use) are that it is very fast, good-looking, easy to use and, so far, stable.
Installation was completely painless and Chrome successfully imported settings, history, account details and bookmarks from Mozilla. Performance does not appear to deteriorate as new tabs are opened - it just chews them up and renders them and there isn't even the slightest hint that the pages were designed in another browser (which may indicate that both pages and browser are sticking closely to the published standards).
As an application browser (by which I mean a browser that runs applications rather than one that simply displays web pages), it seems to do exactly what Google said it would do in the blog (link); unsurprisingly it seems to work extremely well with GMail and other Google products.
The internal Task Manager (shift-esc) details each tab's memory, network and CPU usage so it should be possible to identify and weed-out the resource hogs - it will be interesting to see if these figures become popular performance metrics for websites and developers. The "Stats for nerds" link on the Task Manager opens a tab with more detailed, developer-targeted, information.
In short, and without objectively testing the product's performance (my knowledge of the technologies employed is insufficient, not to say non-existent), it looks like Google have done a good job; Chrome has a useful and interesting set of features that will make it a strong contender in the browser market. Mozilla, Safari and Opera might be in trouble.
Recommendation - If you can accept the product's Beta status, install it now.
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