I downloaded Google’s new browser, Chrome about 15 or 20 minutes ago, and I’m using it right now to do this post. So far, so good. Indeed, based on my first test, it will supplant Firefox for me. This is because FF3 has been very sketchy in handling PDFs. FF2 would launch PDFs inside the browser just fine. But FF3 would crash every time I clicked on a PDF link. Every time, at least, until I fiddled with the plug-ins and made it launch PDFs in Acrobat Reader instead of in the browser. Chrome, however, launches PDFs in the browser just fine. Which is more pleasing to me.
Anyway, based on first impressions, this thing is nice, and if it can do as it is suggested it can do (that is, treat each tab as a separate process and keep from killing the entire browsing session because of one crappy website) it’s gonna be a killer browser. Of course, as it’s Google, they’re gonna find all sorts of ways to sell advertising.
It can be found here: http://gears.google.com/chrome/?hl=en
(Hmmm, small postscript: as I was Googling “chrome browser” to find the URL, Google actually took some time to load; longer than normal. Don’t know if that’s going to be common, or if it’s just due to presumably high traffic as geeks the world over scramble to download it…)
