Internet Exporer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and now comes Chrome. The new open source web browser made by Google looks to be a new direction on how we surf the web. Chrome is stripped down to the basic necessities, and shows this in the speed it renders web applications. Gmail in particular (wonder why?) loads about twice as fast as in traditional browsers.The idea of “web applications” is shown the ability of chrome to create a shortcut to open a single page in an even more simplified Chrome window. For example, I created a shortcut to gmail on my desktop, that when clicked opens a single Chrome window with just gmail, and nothing else (no address bar or bookmarks). This could be handy for people who want to open webmail as they would a local program like Outlook, or Thunderbird. This feature also expands on the idea of Web 2.0

Another new idea put into reality by Chrome is creating a separate instance of the Chrome browser for each tab launched. While this can eat up loads of memory, it should (in theory) make Chrome highly stable, as one tab’s contents will not affect the performance of another. For example if one website was to cause an error and crash, the other tabs in Chrome would be isolated, and hopefully continue to run as usual.

Also worthy of mention is Chrome’s “incognito” function. This allows the user to browse without having to worry about Chrome creating records of sites visited. While this is possible by tweaking settings on most popular browsers, Chrome takes it one step further by having an easy shortcut to this feature for people who don’t wish to go digging around in settings.

Lastly, Chrome makes life easier by its ability to import most personal settings from an already installed web browser. In my test drive, Chrome was able to import not only my bookmarks, but also my saved passwords from the Firefox installation on my PC. This is a nice feature, because it saves you from having to retype any passwords, or request a forgotten ones.

Overall I found Chrome to be quite fast, but it is no Firefox. Chrome is built not for functionality, but for speed. Numerous extensions or add-ons would simply slow it down, and get away from the main idea behind Chrome. So, if you are looking for a browser with loads of add-ons avaliable for increased funtionality, Chrome is not it. If however, you simply need a browser to view webpages, no more, no less, than give Chrome a shot, you may be pleasently suprised.