For months if not years rumor had it that Google was cooking up a browser of their own which many dubbed "The gBrowser". Since Google had built a good relationship with the Mozilla foundation it was presumed that they would build it on top of the Mozilla rendering engine "Gecko" but Google has just announced / released the "Google Chrome" Web Browser, based on WebKit, the rendering engine inside Safari and Konqueror.
You can download the beta here for Windows (it will be available for Mac and Linux shortly) in one of 43 languages and give it a test spin yourself.
The interface screams of simplicity yet under the hood contains a lot of great design. The browser is designed to load each tab as its own process in the host Operating System, thus if one site crashes, you need not lose your entire browser and all other sites.
Tabs can be easily dragged, dropped and re-arranged... and best of all you can drag a tab out of the set, and start a new window... or merge one or more tabs back into one window just by dragging it back. (Note to all Web Browser makers, this is how all browsers should work!
Developers will be happy too, since it runs WebKit, its fast and any site that supports Safari 3.1 will work just fine with Google Chrome. Not only that it comes with a Task Manager that reports back how much memory your web site/application is actually using so you can watch your memory management and check for memory leaks.
For end users and developers go download it now and check it out! As for Google, welcome to the Modern Browser party, we're certainly glad to have you... Diversity is the key to the modern web.
Submit a bug
Posts
