Google hinted early last week about the release of its open source project Google Chrome. Google even created a Google Chrome comic book drawn by Scott McCloud. Last Tuesday, they officially announced the launch of their new browser Google Chrome.
If you haven’t test driven it yet here are some screenshots for your viewing pleasure:
What you notice first about the browser is its simplicity. It feels less busy and cluttered compared to IE or Firefox. It focuses your attention on the tabbed browsing and allows you to tear and reattach a web page like you would in Safari. When opening a new blank tab you can quickly navigate to your most recently visited sites and added bookmarks. When browsing the web using Google Chrome you’ll notice how fast it is. And boy is it ever! Benchmark speed reports on Google Chrome and Firefox are both claiming being faster than the other fuelling debate about the bias in reporting and which browser owns the bragging rights for being the fastest. You can view the summary of benchmark reports for Chrome and Firefox on TechCrunch.
One cool new feature is the ability to browse in incognito mode. Hit Ctrl+Shift+N and a tab with the incognito browser will open. This feature will let you surf the internet leaving no browser history, no search history and no cookies when you finish your session.
Other features include:
A Task Manager giving you Physical Memory and CPU usage of all web pages opened within Google Chrome
The Aw, Snap! error page and icon
Recently closed tab option (available in FF3 and Opera)
Visual Browsing History
Google Chrome also shows you browser memory usage and breakdown by web page using the about:memory command. I compared Chrome and Firefox using the same sites and number of tabs open in the browser and Chrome uses far less memory resource usage.
Matt Cutts gets into some of the finer details in his Q & A of Google Chrome on what it does and doesn’t do.
Unfortunately there are no add-ons or extensions available in the beta version but let’s hope this will be included in future releases. MAC OS X and Linux users won’t be able to play with Chrome just yet. This is a great release that combines Apple’s Webkit, Google Gears, and V8 Javascript virtual machine (open source) that creates better performance when loading Javascript code and speeds up your web page browsing!
Click to download Google Chrome
it’s an exquisite outcome!
We recently measured Google Chrome for our http://www.taskwriter.com and we surprisingly found out that it is faster than IE 6 about 9 times. If you want to know more about this click on http://www.taskwriter.com/blog/how-good-chrome-really-is/.
We have performed some measurements on the performance of http://www.taskwriter.com . The results show Firefox 3.0 and Chrome being pretty close. By no means as far as Google suggests with its tests.
Full details and graph here : http://www.taskwriter.com/blog/how-good-chrome-really-is/
btw, http://www.taskwriter.com is written using google web toolkit…so advantage for Chrome here.