I’ll be honest, it’s been a while since I was even remotely excited about a new application. Chrome definitely fit that bill. For some reason or another I really wanted to test this little application out. I wanted to see if Google had done anything worthy of their name.

I use Google for searching, I use Google as my RSS reader, to store my story online within Google Docs, and obviously I use Gmail and have done for many years now. These things I use on a nearly daily basis (except for Docs). So playing around with a browser from them obviously was somthing I had to try out. If you look around the blogosphere and the net, everyone’s got a friggin opinion about it. Some have decided to take extreme views on the subject, while others are all playing the waiting game to see what the deal actually was with the browser once they had it in their hands. Others still are pretty optimistic about the whole affair.

I’m not new to this new browser game. When Flock was announced a few years ago I was pretty excited about that…until they dropped the ball, added more cruft and shite to the actual browser and well to be honest made it ugly rather than this extremely slick entity that it could have been. With the exception of Safari usage every once in a while, Firefox has been my default browser for years. I used it originally because it was soo ahead of the game when compared to the available products on the market at the time, probably IE6.

So does Chrome give me that same leap? No, of course it doesn’t. It couldn’t because the idea behind Firefox revolutionised the net in many ways. The truth about Chrome is that it does what it says on the tin and it does it well.

1. The tabs - I thought these would be the biggest annoyance, having them at the top. Truth be told, after 5 minutes, I love them there. They sit perfectly and work great, because there is nothing above them. Effectively the browser uses all the screen real estate wisely. That is something that I really have to applaud Google on. They seem to have achieved this by actually making the rest of the browser minimal as well.

2. OS integration - Yeah, ok it's not OS integrated properly, but seriously for once I don't care. The additional stuff associated with the browser as soo small and unobtrusive that you don't really care that it doesn't have the Vista shite (I'm on holiday in Athens, thus using whatever is available, and this case it's shitty Vista). I can imagine that when the Mac version comes out, it'll be very nicely integrated with Leopard. Hell the icons are practically from Leaopard, but decidedly different at the same time so that it keeps it's own identity, that is if they keep these icons and give me the proper grey.

3. Front Page Tab - Love this. I didn't realise that this was a good idea, until it came as a default. In the same way for FF3 I didn't know what a great idea the star and you've bookmarked a site is (in the navigation bar) in the same way I didn't realise that this actually saves me a lot of time, by displaying the latest sites I've visited and the latest sites I've bookmarked.

4. Speed - Yes it's fast. Scrap that, it's FUCKING fast. I mean, seriously that's the fastest browser I've ever opened. Hell IE7 on Vista isn't this fast. There's got to be something going on here. Is everyone else seeing the same lightning speed at opening up that I've noticed?

5. Task Manager - Now that's a good idea. Much in the same vein as OSX, which allows you to kill any application that is giving you grief, so too does Chrome allow you to shut off any tab from the task manager. The task manager also allows you to have a look and see what amount of memory is being consumed by which application. Case in point Facebook is a power hungry bitch.

Looking forward, what do I want? Of course not everything is rosy and I want some things to be sorted out in future revisions of the software.

1. I want this on OSX. So it's really a matter of time I guess. Make sure it's got the same speed as the Windows version and make sure it's got the proper OS colours as opposed to this light blue. It's ok for Windows, it's not OK for OSX.

2. I want this to be open to plugins and extensions. This is the power of Firefox, that no other browser has ever had the chance of coming close to. You can find nice things you like about other browsers, but ultimately Firefox has got it all and then some. So unlike Safari which is a real pain in the ass to develop stuff for, and even then it's not a proper system, Google really should learn from that and have people develop extensions because that is what will make people take the leap.

3. Sort out that loading bar which is at the bottom of the page. Rubbish idea. Safari does it correctly by loading in the navigation bar. Use that idea instead, it's much more intuative; in the same way the tabs at the top of the page is a great idea.

Edit 1 - Seems they are serious about bringing in more developers to help out and extend Chrome, there is also the Chromium project which has been set up for this purpose. It's going to be pretty interesting to see where this browser will be in a year's time, damn interesting.