Google just put up a download link.
This is the Beta version, for Windows. Mac and Linux users still have to wait a little longer.
In my totally preliminary and totally unscientific observation, I will say it certainly has a fast “feel” to it. Things like opening several tabs & switching between them, scrolling up and down complex pages, and moving around within Google maps all have a very smooth and responsive feel. Other first impressions: It’s simple. Which is kind of refreshing. I like the “most visited thumbnail view” that the browser opens to – instead of a homepage, you see thumbnails of sites you visit frequently… think of it like multiple home pages, that configure themselves based on your habits. It also took me a moment to notice – there’s no search bar! (which took me by surprise seeing its a Google web browser and all) – until I realized the regular address bar doubles as the search bar when something besides a URL is typed in.
So far so good. It’s worth a shot… It was a quick download and painless installation.
It looks like another potential game-changer on the Internet as we know it, care of Google. In classic Google style they’ve found a way to ignore the traditional avenues and appear to be announcing this decision via… comic book! The comic book stars caricatures of several of Google’s engineers and programmers who tell the story of why new thinking in web browsing is justified, and just how they plan to accomplish it. Ironic yet is that the comic book was printed on old fashioned paper, and distributed by good old “snail mail” to journalists and bloggers.
The browser is to be titled Chrome and will be an open-source project. The main driving force behind it is to design a browser that actually reflects what we use the web for in modern times: applications. In the web’s early days, it was simply designed to be a large scale document repository, allowing any document to be linked to any other document. As it’s evolved, these mess of loosely tied documents have grown into full blown applications. Rather than just retrieving and using information, we use the web on a daily basis to perform interactive computing tasks. We check our e-mail, we network with friends, go shopping, get driving directions, share videos and photos. Google thinks we should have a web browser that puts applications first, rather than the current paradigm of hacking applications into the old document storage-and-retrieval framework the web works on today. Plans are to incorporate an entirely new scratch-built Java virtual machine which they’ve code named V8 to power much of this progress.
(more…)
