A First Look at Google Chrome

Google Chrome became available for download this afternoon.

Ever the adventurer, I decided to take a look at it.  After all, I downloaded Internet Explorer 8 the other day…

First impressions are quite impressive.  It loads and renders web pages very quickly.  I tried it out on my blog, wiki, and website and it made them look just the way that I figured that they should.  I wasn’t surprised by the blog or wiki as the trend in these areas is a simple approach without the bells and whistles.

It doesn’t look bad at all.  I tried it out with a few sites that I know requires plug-ins and the sites loaded properly without any further intervention.

You’ll note in the screen cap above that it takes a very minimalist approach.  The location and search bar (defaults surprisingly to Google.com) are one and the same.  It served both purposes nicely.  The items that you would normally associate with menus, appear in pull-down menus at the top right.

Of interest, are some of the new menu items.  “Incognito Window” lets you use the internet without any traces on your computer.  Internet Explorer calls it “Inprivate Browsing”.  Just hope that you don’t have to retrace your steps.

I always head to the Options first when I look at a new piece of software.  The default is to send statistics and crash reports to Google.  If you’re uncomfortable with that, you may wish to uncheck it.  Other than that, you’ll find the same sort of things that you would normally expect on a browser.

I’m further intrigued to see the integration of Google Gears into this browser.  In order to really test something, you need to immerse yourself in it and that will take up parts of my evenings for a while!

Chrome is available only for Windows at present but there is a promise of a Macintosh and Linux version. soon.

If you’re a Windows user and have a hankering for something new, it’s definitely worth a download and a look.  Chrome has sure created some interest over the past while and it really came to a forefront yesterday with the release of the Comic Book press release.