So this is Google Chrome...

I was on Windows and noticed that Google had already released the beta for Google Chrome. So I thought, why not try it out?

What I like

The subtle effects

There is a lot of animations and fading. And they don't get in the way or become annoying. My favourite is the tab effect. When it opens it kind of stretches and shrinks when you close it. It just adds that "professional" touch

It takes up very little room

This will be great for things like netbooks. Who would have thought that moving a few things around would save so much space?

Webkit

It uses Webkit. That means it loads things fast

The new tab page

It puts the best of everything into one. It has quick access to bookmarks, recently visited pages, recently bookmarked pages and recently closed tabs. It couldn't get much better

It's well designed

The Google devs really know what intuitive is The tabs are nice and rounded and actually look like real life tabs. The icons are simple and not glossy like most other web browsers seem to favour (aka Firefox and Opera). Personally I think it looks very nice with icons like that. Another thing I like is that there is no longer a "File, Edit etc." menu but rather two icons which you can do just about everything with, and don't confuse you with endless options. Finally, I really like the status bar. It appears (almost) instantly when it should and fades out after it's no longer needed.

Text field resizing

It has that cool text field resizing feature that Safari has.

Better download manager

Much less intrusive than the default Firefox one. You can get this with Firefox but I personally think that Google Chrome's download manager is a lot nicer than this extension. I also like the downloads page. If you click on the "Show all downloads" link it will come up with a new tab a bit like Opera's but a lot better looking. You can search the downloads and shows the date and time the file was downloaded in a clear and simple Google like way.

Task manager

Google Chrome separates each tab into a process of their own. This means that if you go onto YouTube, and suddenly your CPU goes high, you can either simply close the tab, or if you don't know which tab is the culprit, you can use the task manager (Shift+Esc), look for the high CPU process and kill it.

Google Gears or application shortcuts

If you have a useful webpage that you like to check, for example a news website, you can add a shortcut on the Desktop, Start Menu or Quick Launch (not sure how they'll do this for Linux though...). So you can just double click on the icon and then you'll get the website in it's own window, without tabs/address bars etc. to check things quickly.

Inspecting elements

Non web developers won't need this, but for me, Firebug for Firefox was a great tool. You can right click on an element on the page to inspect it.

What I don't like

Scrolling

There is no smooth scrolling feature and using my touchpad to scroll makes it skip way too far than I expect it to.

Status bar

The status bar doesn't immediately appear. When I hover over a link I usually look there except on websites like forums for example.

Address bar text

The address bar text is strangely very big. I'm not used to it but I'm sure I'll get used to it.

What it needs

• Screenshots for tabs like Opera has
• More options to customize
• To be ported to Linux

Personally I find it pretty amazing that Google can create a web browser that almost blows away Firefox and Opera, and it's only in beta! When it gets ported to Linux (hopefully soon) I'll definitely be switching from Firefox/Opera

Screenshots

Google Chrome: Compare this with Mozilla FirefoxMozilla Firefox: See how much space is wasted!Downloading files: Much less intrusiveDownloads: The downloads pageNew tab page: Filled with useful informationTask manager: See the CPU/memory hogs and kill them!