I’m impressed. It’s everything I would have expected from Google, and more. 

The Google Chrome Beta was just released, and I don’t think I’ll be going back to Firefox any time soon. It’s fast. It’s stable. It’s pretty. 

The first thing you’ll notice is the layout. Tabs are located above everything in the title bar area, and because of this, you get more screen space for browsing. It also just makes sense. (more on this later). The status bar is non existant as well, freeing up even more screen space. Instead, when you hover over a URL, a small bar pops up that tells you where you’re going, the unobtrusivly disappears. Very classy, very well-thought out. 

More on the tabs: Each tab has it’s own process now, which you can see by viewing the built in task manager. From this, you can view how much memory each tab and each plugin are using… and kill the process if it gets out of hand. Gone are the days of Firefox and IE using 200+ megabytes of memory… even though you’ve closed all your tabs. They’ve taken the concept of tabs, and make them the king. Instead of having a browser filled with tabs, you have browser tabs that are grouped together by a slick interface. That may sound like the same thing to some of you… but it really isn’t. 

I ran a few tests on it, including the Acid3 and Acid2 test. It did better than Firefox in the Acid3 test, scoring a 78/100 (not bad!), and passes the Acid2 test with flying colors, as expected at this point.

The javascript speed is pretty exciting. After running about 6 tests, Chrome performs anywhere from 4 to 25 times faster than Firefox, and is right on par with Safari, being anywhere to 50% to 120% of the speed, depending on the test. It’s even 2 to 5 times faster than (*cough*) unbloated IE6. 

The beta release is Windows only at this point at http://www.google.com/chrome , but source code is available for those who want to build it on linux at http://www.chromium.org 

Tags: chrome, firefox, google, news, safari, tips, web 2.0, web browser