Early Thoughts on Chrome

Disclaimer: I am in fact a Googler and anything I share in this post or any post are my opinions and are not representative of the company.

I thought I would write a short piece on the newly released Google browser called Chrome. As one of my friends put, "I'm curious to hear your thoughts since you are such a big firefox fan." This is true, I do still love the firefox browser. However, I do like Chrome a lot! I have been using the Chrome browser for a few months now and it has not completely replaced my use of firefox, but it is a hell of a browser. The browser just feels cleaner, faster, and more polished. So the bottom line is if you are on a Windows machine you most definitely should download Chrome and give a try!

Here are some features I really like:

• When you open a new tab it opens next to the tab you're currently on
• Each tab is it's own process. So if one tab crashes your whole browser doesn't crash
• The find (ctrl-f) feature highlights all instances of the word AND shows the count of that word
• Incognito mode
• When you open a new blank tab (ctrl-t) it will show a image of your 9 most visited sites similar to speed dial 
• If you want to see a few goodys under the hood check out this - http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/09/google-chromes-about-pages.html

There has been a lot talked about the speed and to be honest I'm not the best to talk about that, but it seems pretty quick to me. Also, another exciting aspect of the browser is the new V8 JaveScript engine has reportedly helped load pages much faster and help with application like pages such as Google Docs. Lastly, the fact that the browser is an open source project is really exciting to me, this is a great thing to see the company do because it is us backing what we say about making the web a more open space.

Overall, I'm pumped to watch the next 6 months of development and I encourage everyone to give it a try!

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments and I will do my best to answer them. Also, Matt Cutts has written a lot of great articles about the browser from a Googlers perspective as well.