Just on the off chance you’ve been severely disconnected with the cyber-world at large lately and haven’t heard about Google’s new web browser, Chrome, I thought I would let you know my first impressions. I’ll admit that I was very skeptical upon first reading about it. It would take a lot to pry me away from Firefox and all of my beloved add-ons, and so I apprehensively proceeded. But I must admit, I’m pleasantly surprised, Google came through. So far, I’m really taking a liking to Chrome… a lot. It’s light, sleek and extremely fast (which I do realize has a lot to do with the aforementioned add-ons), but still, it moves with the quickness.

Here’s a rundown of the features you can expect.

• Easy bookmarking - I use the delicious add-on in Firefox for my bookmark toolbar so I needed a few of my most visited sites bookmarked in Chrome. You just click the star to the left of the address bar on any page you want to bookmark and choose your folder. Very quick and easy.
• Streamlined Surfing - I love the fact that the address bar and search bar are combined into one. I have a bad habit in Firefox of typing addresses into the Google search, so having them both in one bar is perfect.
• Tailoring Tabs - The new tabs page has a few pretty cool features. It gives you thumbnail screenshots of your most visited sites, recently visited search engines, your latest bookmarks and recently closed tabs.
• Overall Tab Functionality - Chrome’s tabs are very dynamic and can be pulled anywhere, even into their own window then put back into the main window. I was also very happy to see that they incorporated the scroll wheel click for opening a link in a new tab. That has pretty much become an automatic act for me so I was really hoping it would be a feature.
• Tasking Your Browser - A great addition to Chrome, is that all the tabs run independently of each other, meaning that one website won’t crash your entire browser. And using the built-in task manager you can manually close sites that are misbehaving.
• Incognito mode - I really don’t have a use for this since I work from home, but I can see it being very helpful to people working in offices that need to hide their browsing practices. A stealth window that won’t be revealed in the history or the recently closed tabs section seems sneakier than necessary, but then again, I guess it depends on who’s accessing your system and just exactly what it is that you’ve been accessing that warrants the incognito mode employed (maybe it’s the kind of sites that used to crash your entire browser. Uh-huh, thought so. Delinquents…just out of curiosity, what were those particular sites?).
• A Familiar Fox-like Warning - Google went with a warning system for Chrome that Firefox users have grown accustomed to when warning of unsafe websites. So it’s nothing that new, just good.
• Browser Compatibility - You can easily import all of your settings, bookmarks, saved passwords, etc from both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Bringing the web your used to, to your new browser.
• More Manageable Downloads - The Chrome download manager is not only extremely user friendly, but also convenient. I like the fact that you can just open the download by clicking on it in the download manager or move it wherever you want from there.

Some things I’ve been having issues with so far:

• No adblock. I’ve been completely spoiled by adblock plus and need an add free browsing experience.
• I’ve had some copy/paste problems, something so small that I’m sure will be fixed before the official release
• It seemed to have some trouble loading Arbenting at first. This could have just been a fluke since I haven’t had any issues since the first load. If anyone else experiences any loading trouble in Chrome please let us know
• Bookmarking - The Flipside - Since I frequently use delicious for my bookmarks, I no longer have the one click bookmark system that I’m used to. Hopefully Google will open the doors to this opensource project to developers to come up with a few familiar, functionality plug-ins, or maybe I’m just jumping the gun, and these kinds of issues will be addressed in further beta releases. Either way, there are still a few areas where they have to step it up to turn me away from my fully loaded Firefox!

If you want to read more about Google’s motivation behind Chrome and what they eventually hope to achieve with it, the Chrome Comic is a good read.

Developers may also be interested in Google’s Information for Web Developers

So that’s was Angie’s review, here’s mine. I have a Mac. So far it’s only available for Windows but both Mac and Linux versions are on the way. So I haven’t tested or played with it at all. If you’re running windows and want to give it a try, download Google Chrome Beta for Windows