the first thing you notice is of course google’s trademark clutter-free interface. they’ve also flipped the tabs upwards which is supposed to be a big deal, but i’m having some trouble getting used to it.

since it’s google, you’ expect the uber innovations to jump out anytime and change your life. it isn’t mind-blowing or revolutionary, but it is pretty sweet.

any new tab you open has a grid reminiscent of opera’s displaying your most visited websites. mine so far have been google, bloglines, facebook and youtube. so much for productivity at work, eh?

other things i liked: the magical invisible status bar (which only appears when you hover over links)

the download window (window being a slightly misleading term since it appears within the browser)

chrome won my heart when i found out it caters to my multiple split personalities. The Stalker loves incognito window, which lets you to surf without leaving nasty little crumbs of browser history, search history and cookies. downloads and bookmarks are still logged though, so spare a thought before you save that furry porn, you sicko.

The Geek loves the built-in task manager that lets you view the active processes (in chrome only la ok, don’t expect the browser to take over your pc) and what it’s holding up: memory, cpu and network resources. one article says to click on title bar to call it up, but i’m absolutely bat-like when it comes to finding stuff that’s right in front of my face so i use SHIFT+ESC to call it up instead.

here are some facts and figures i did not make up.

graph from zdnet

scriptnode has subjected chrome to a battering of 6 different benchmark tests which i’m not going to replicate here cos i’m not big enough a geek. all you need to know is that chrome came out harder, better, faster, stronger.

the ever prevalent google humour can be found even in browser commands. *hint hint*

about:blank
about:cache (mapped to view-cache:)
about:dns
about:histograms
about:objects
about:memory
about:plugins
about:stats
about:version
about:network
about:ipc
about:internets

what i would like is for chrome to support my favourite add-ons: Read it Later, StumbleUpon, DownloadHelper, FireFTP, Foxmarks, Delicious and Adblock. remember, kiddies, this is still in BETA and there might be some massive security flaws, so don’t fucking click any damn thing you see.

so download it and try it. or don’t. i’m just going to drag the tabs in and out of my window.

(no chrome for mac yet. booooooo.)

[update: get a portable version of chrome here.]

Flock 1.2.4
Netscape Navigator 9.0.0.6
IE 7 7.05730.13
Firefox 2.0.0.16
Opera 9.25
Safari 3.1.2