We wanted to share some early reactions to the Google Chrome browser, which launched (beta) just an hour or two ago. The short story is, it’s fast and it’s simple.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the Google Chrome announcement, the Chrome browser is a Google project to enhance browsing safety and push web technology forward. It has many features in common with the popular Mozilla Firefox browser but treats each tab, each plugin and each page process as separate, multi-threaded events. This allows it to be incredibly fast and also give the user the ability to kill individual pages that are not responding or are tying up too many resources. It also touts a developer-friendly AI and design system that should allow robust web applications that are manageable for the developer and friendly for the end user.

We feel like Chrome is simply awesome for your daily browsing. However, many powerful features that we love in firefox will take awhile to arrive on this new platform. Here are some early pros and cons that we see:

Pros

• ridiculously fast
• minimalist UI, allowing maximum page viewing
• individualized tab processes should be more stable
• solid API concepts and open platform offer lots of development potential
• more secure web browsing experience versus malware and popups

Cons

•  some compatibility bugs to work out (our own CMS admin system won’t work)
• uses proxy settings from IE (bad if your admin has shutdown proxy setting access!)
• no master password like Firefox uses. This is a fairly big con to us.
• lack of rich web developer tools and other plugins at launch Edit: actually, Chrome features a Firebug clone called the javascript console under the Developer menu item
• Seems to use a few more resources initially with the individualized tab system. However, this offers an increase in overall stability. Again…borderline con.

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