Google Chrome

It’s now been a few days since Google made the beta version of their new browser, Chrome, publicly available. At first glance, it looks fairly same-old, same-old. The interface is quite nice and sleek, includes all the core features you’d expect from a browser (but not many “extras” at the moment since it’s just a beta release).

According to Google, the main improvements are under the hood – making it load faster, handle JavaScript better and with better stability. And when things do go wrong and a site makes the browser crash, Google claims it will not take down the entire browser – just the offending tab. Sounds nice. Similarly, if one tab is hung up on a long running task, the other tabs will be unaffected.

It’s still in it’s early stages and so it’s probably a little early to try completely switching to it, but I’d definitely recommend downloading it and giving it a try.

It’s only available for Windows at the moment, with releases for Mac and Linux apparently not too far off. I’m a little surprised they didn’t manage a simultaneous release across the three platforms (taking into account Google’s might) but since they’re mainly trying to compete with Internet Explorer, I guess it makes sense that the main focus initially has been a Windows release.