Google’s New Web Browser: Chrome

The Google Chrome browser in action

This afternoon Google introduced a new Web browser called Chrome. They describe it as “a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.”

The software is still considered beta (unfinished) but seems to run well in our few hours of testing so far. In a comic designed to explain the ‘under the hood’ improvements, they explain how it could reduce memory usage, prevent crashes, and protect your PC from malicious websites.

For example, if you’re like me you constantly have several pages open at once, in tabs. Firefox, our browser of choice, has always had issues with memory management, causing memory usage to rise to alarming levels (hundreds of MB of RAM) at times, even after closing unused pages. Chrome treats each page, each tab, as a separate process, with it’s own memory space. According to  Google, once a tab is closed, the memory can be completely reclaimed.

Anyway, we like it so far. The simplified interface works well for me. Pages seem to load more quickly. Most video and audio clips worked, even Microsoft’s WM video formats.

You can download Chrome here. Let us know what you think.