Google “surprised” the world several weeks ago when it released Chrome, a new web browser —  The surprise being that everyone was wondering why it was taking Google so long to release the browser that had been rumored to be in development for a couple of years.  Anyway, Chrome manages to up the ante on Firefox with its non-adventure-related name. Navigator, Explorer, and Safari seem so quaint now that Chrome and all its pimp-daddy aura is out and about.   

That aside, I’ve been messing with Chrome for the past few days and I’m been extremely impressed.  It has a minimal presentation that really gets out of your way and renders webpages extremely fast.  Behind the scenes, it uses the excellent Webkit library that is also used by Safari.   The one drawback to Chrome is the lack of extensions and “power”-features that Firefox has.  Several of those are essential to my job so I primarily use Chrome to monitor my GMail/GReader.  

If I was a typical user on a Windows PC, I would definitely consider using Chrome as my default browser.  Since it’s open source, I’m looking forward to Firefox and Safari adopting some of the internal features that make Chrome so fast.