The Browser Wars are heating up, and it’s not a two-horse race. Sure Opera’s essentially been an also ran for years, but Apple’s Safari has been scarfing up market share with it’s insidious installation tactics and entrenched iPhone base. Now our benevolent overlords at Google have launched Chrome, a new open-source browser with some innovative design. Chrome promises to bring an end to crashing all of your browser tabs and windows for one misbehaving script or plugin and improved memory management. Google has launched it all with a comic starring engineers, designers and developers introducing their intriguing new baby and explaining what sets it apart from the crowd. Hit the jump for some initial reactions.
I’ve been using Chrome since it’s launch at roughly 2PM Eastern yesterday. The first things you’ll notice upon firing it up are it’s pleasing, minimalist UI and it’s speed. The UI sleek and provides plenty of real estate. It breaks away from many desktop traditions and the result is a striking and highly usable. It’s rendering engine, WebKit, is already known for it’s speed, and Chrome certainly enjoys these advantages. Pages render fast and render well, with colors looking bolder and more vibrant.
This is not to imply that all is smooth sailing or that Chrome is completely ready to be your browser sugar-daddy. A few pages have looked a little “wonky” in my time putting Chrome through it’s paces and Flash doesn’t seem to be functioning properly for me at least.
I’ll continue playing around with it and would recommend giving it a look yourself. Currently there is only a Windows version, Linux and Mac should be inbound hopefully soon.
