Google Chrome just came out and I was kind of excited to give it a shot. I particularly enjoy that in the planning of this browser they anticipate bugs and unsavory things to happen during a typical web experience.

The rundown. Chrome is a browser, similar in function and appearance to the popular tabbable browsers out there: Firefox, Safari, IE, etc. The first thing I enjoy is the lack of clutter, it is clear that the developers wanted to maximize useful screen space, it’s similar to viewing Firefox in “full screen” mode. Chrome treats each tab as its own independently processing application, this is particularly handy when you get a website with buggy scripting that causes the browser to stall. Instead of losing all of your other opened tabs and the entire program, you just lose that single tab. Neat, right? They even have a task manager for your tabs, so you can “end process” one if necessary. I like this feature. A lot.

Aside from the very basic differences (there are many more, but I’d need a lot more room to expand on them) there are functionally some neat things happening. When you open a new tab, a grid of website previews loads on the page, these websites are your most frequently visited sites. This is supposed to be a big time saver, though I don’t see it–if something is bookmarked, all I need to do is go to the bookmark, mouse-wheel click it, and it opens in a new tab, or in toolbar bookmarks, simply mouse-wheel click. Though, now that most of my bookmarks are all in del.icio.us (or should I say, delicious) this truly might be more efficient than logging in, searching, clicking.

Speed. I’ve noticed that most sites seem to load noticeably faster than in other browsers. When doing multi-tasking, this is especially nice since as I mentioned before, each tab is its own process and functions independently. Their nifty comic (I love the idea of using a comic to explain a process or technical something, it’s the perfect mode for non-video text/visual information) of the development process hints to when Windows ran asynchronously and each process would have to wait its turn. Things get ugly when any process fails, because the rest in line will continue to wait, forever.

A little more about the background of the project from the developers:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGmO7Oximw8[/youtube]

Privacy. A feature that would be handy for browsers used by multiple people is called incognito. This feature makes the browser record zero history and private information from content in the designated tab(s).

Let’s see, what else? Oh, right. You can drag a tab outside the window to create a new window of itself. You can drag tabs between windows too. I do a lot more tab dragging lately, this would definitely be handy. Also, the box where the URL usually goes also functions as your search box and history. Download status shows at the bottom of the window, no pop-up!

Currently, my only gripe with Chrome is my dependence on add-ons for Firefox, there are so many good ones and I like them a lot. This may just be the clincher for a permanent browser swap for me. However, it’s definitely my new backup browser! It appears that Google is working on an API for third-party add-ons to be released later on…promising.