Today, on a whim, I installed Google’s new Chrome browser.  And I have to say I’m very impressed.  It is indeed very fast.  It has a nice clean user interface.  It’s very intuitive, without lots of hidden settings here and hidden things there to change.

There’s an interesting article on TechCrunch, Live From The Google Chrome Press Event.

So far, my only real complaint is that I miss the Firefox Adblock plug-in. Whether it’ll ever be supported or not, I don’t know. But I’ve sure gotten used to pages with no obnoxious ads and videos on them. Particularly CNN.com’s Money page, which has an auto-start video.

The other minor detail that’s simply a bit of retraining on my part is that I’ve also gotten used to typing ‘/’ to search a page in Firefox. Chrome, like IE and Opera, use control-F (Firefox does also, but ‘/’ is an alias for control-F).

In the process of authoring this article, I’ve run across another minor annoyance. If the currently active tab opens a new tab, the new tab is located immediately to the right of the currently active tab. I’m used to it opening at the far right, and there’s where I expect to look for the new tab.

One of Chrome’s really nice features is that each tab is a process unto itself. If a process crashes, it doesn’t take down the whole browser (something that rarely happens to me in Windows Firefox, but frequently in the Linux version). And with the Chrome Task Manager, should a tab run away or not respond, it can be killed without shutting down the other tabs. It also displays the amount of memory each tab is using.

Chrome can be downloaded from http://www.google.com/chrome.