Opening Twhirl this morning I saw a blast of posts around Google's slightly unplanned unveiling of its new, open source web browser, Chrome.
There's no download yet, and when there is it will initially only be for Windows machines ("Mac and Linux coming soon"), but there's a comic sketch available to tell you more.
I currently use Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox as my main browsers and they each have their strengths and weaknesses:
Safari looks great (better than Firefox), seems fairly snappy, and integrates nicely with everything else on the Mac. Yet, it's rich text/html capabilities are rubbish (especially when using something like Typepad or eBay's listings page), the progress bar isn't utilised well enough, and some websites just don't like it.
On the other hand, Firefox for the Mac is feature rich, has great rich text/html capabilities, seems to work on all the sites Safari doesn't, has a better password memory system and also seems fairly snappy.
On the downside it's a little bloated, uses too much RAM and can crash or have more frequent connection problems.
Thus, it will be interesting to see if Google Chrome, "using components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox among others" and with lots of other innovations under the hood, can really compete in this space and take the best from the rest to deliver a top notch browsing experience. Expectations are certainly building ahead of the download being made available later today.
