First they recreated the internet, now Google finally improves the browser.

Google released their first browser today, called Chrome. I jumped on it the moment I read about it's availability, and I already love it. It addresses a number of issues that have annoyed me about other browser, so neatly that I almost feel as if they interviewed me personally and wrote me a browser.  Favorite features include the sparse and uncluttered interface, which seems to take up considerably less screen real estate, always in short supply, especially on compact road warrior laptops. Also notable are the ability to create a Desktop or Start Menu icon for applications such as gmail, which then opens them in a window with no browser buttons or menus at all, cleanly displaying the web app alone.  Perhaps the single most welcome feature is the arrival of Ctrl-Tab, to cycle through open tabs within the browser window much as Alt-Tab cycles through open windows on the computer.  Since I frequently get dozens of tabs open, I have longed for this feature, and searched for it in all other browsers, somehow unable to believe that it did not exist.

Chrome is also very fast, and appears to be very memory efficient.  Surprisingly, it is not based on the Mozilla foundation's browser components, despite the fact that Google has been the single biggest funder of that foundation and it's Firefox browser.  Instead, it is based on WebKit, most notably used as the core of Apple's Safari browser.  If I recall correctly, WebKit was originally based on the browser components developed for the KDE user interface system for Linux computers, and Safari has always been impressively fast.  Honestly, it's not that surprising that WebKit was used, just given the resulting speed and efficiency gains.  I've been a firefox user for years, but was greatly underwhelmed by the 3.0 release, which didn't seem to address any of the issues which bugged me about version 2, ether in interface enhancement or performance improvement.

Speaking of performance improvement, the biggest claim Google is making regards stability.  The technical details were released in cartoon form, but the long story short is that each tab should run in an independent process, so a failing chunk of javascript or a dying plugin should not crash the whole browser and the other 30 tabs open.  We'll see about that. 

Chrome is released open source, and Google's stated intention is not to enter the browser market, but to spur development forward, and I think they may have succeeded in changing the standards by which browsers are judged. An ideal situation might be to see Firefox 4 move heavily towards this new code, greatly improving that excellent but somewhat languishing project.