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I just down­loaded and installed Google Chrome after read­ing the comic book that explains the details of the project. I had been hear­ing rumors about it last week but I didn’t pay much atten­tion to them. In the last cou­ple days there had seemed to be much antic­i­pa­tion (and over-​hype) about its release and what it means. I must say I was pre­pared to be under­whelmed… and, as a Web designer, think­ing, who needs yet another new browser to test sites into? But after using it for a lit­tle bit, I must admit I like what I see.

My ini­tial hes­i­ta­tion came mostly from the fact that, aside from its search engine tech­nol­ogy, I haven’t been impressed by much of what Google has released in the past. I don’t use GMail and I don’t use Google Documents for the same basic rea­son. So far, I still much pre­fer desk­top appli­ca­tions for email and office type tasks and my com­mu­ni­ca­tions and orga­ni­za­tional activ­i­ties are pretty much cen­tered in Outlook 2007. It works very well for me and my data is on my own machine where I want it. I never liked Web based email to begin with.

But Chrome is dif­fer­ent because it is a desk­top appli­ca­tion and the foun­da­tions and ideas on which it was built are very inter­est­ing. As many noted and despite a lot of over-​hype (what else is new in the tech world…), Chrome has a lot of things that were already in other browsers. My main browser is Opera 9.5 and I really have not seen any other that is as fast or feature-​rich. But Chrome is fast too… damn fast actu­ally, espe­cially with JavaScript and I really like the min­i­mal inter­face. This is a first beta and can only improve with time. Also, so far all my sites I looked at with Chrome dis­play cor­rectly and pretty much the same as Safari, FF 3 or IE7. Its text ren­der­ing seems iden­ti­cal to Safari which is nor­mal since both are based on the WebKit ren­der­ing engine.

So, in sum­mary, Google Chrome seems like a solid entry in the crowded browser world and will only get bet­ter. But, I would take the pre­ma­ture pre­vi­sions of some pun­dits that Chrome will cause the demise of MSIE with a huge grain of salt… Haven’t we heard that one before?

Won’t tech com­men­ta­tors ever learn that “reg­u­lar” peo­ple are crea­tures of habit and are unlikely to change browsers just because a new player’s in town? Don’t they get that Microsoft is entrenched in the busi­ness world for the fore­see­able future? Those who should be wor­ried by this are the other smaller play­ers IMO, like Opera and Firefox and maybe even Safari which seems to be as entrenched on the Mac as MSIE is on PCs… for now.

Anyway, only time will tell how Chrome will affect the browser wars but it is a good piece of soft­ware that brings wel­come com­pe­ti­tion and inno­va­tion. And did I say it was fast! I’m writ­ing this blog post in it through TinyMCE now which unfor­tu­nately doesn’t work in Opera yet. Good going with this one Google!