Where do I begin? First off when I heard about it I was a bit reluctant to it as I'm a proud user of a small browser I like to call Mozilla Firefox. So I gathered some information about it and at first it didn't seem that interesting. And I said to myself that it would never beat Firefox - no way! The interface looked bad (on XP anyway), the tabs were too far off to the top and it just looked very strange... Well look what happened; I am now writing this blog entry in the Google Chrome browser. That means I haven't completely turned to the dark side where your first choice is the right one and fuck the rest.

Competition is pretty awesome actually, it means more options for us and more thinking required for the developers. This brings me to the competition between the most popular browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera. Firefox is customizable, Internet Explorer has, eh... a large chunk of the market (if you can call it that), Safari is said to be fast and Opera works great on mobile devices (right?). But where does Chrome come in, what does it bring to the table? Well, as it's based on other open source software like WebKit and Mozilla, Google proclaims it to be more stable, faster and secure and all that comes in a simple interface. OK, we have all heard that before - basically after each software update.

With all that in mind I downloaded it and installed it and when it first came to view I was completely in love with the interface. In Vista it's just the way a browser should look like - simple but stylish! When you are in a new tab you get a nice thumbnail list of recently visited sites (Speed Dial - Opera, I know), search your history option and recent bookmarks. Simple and fast. When you type in the address bar you get a speedy site list of possible matches to the address you are typing (autocomplete stuff - checked). Then you have your bookmarks that I imported from my Firefox 3 browser. And then you have the main window - the heart of the browser where your sites show up. First impression on speed - yeah it renders the sites you go to fast and according to Google it should be twice as fast as Firefox 3 and the Safari 4 beta. You have a task manager so that you can close slow tabs and now comes one of the things I though was really cool!

Multiprocessing means that each tab has it's own process and all tabs you have open don't slow the others down. The tabs work separately and if one crashes then it doesn't affect the others and the whole browsing in multiple tabs experience doesn't get sluggish. All in all I will now follow the evolution of Chrome and hope version 1.0 will be released soon! Now I wait and see what they'll do about extensions and then I am completely sold.

Maybe Google is right about starting from scratch and making something work great for today's web standards.

Firefox look out, a new power is rising: Chrome!