As announced in their blog yes­ter­day, Google released its open source web browser today at 12pm PDT. It is called Google Chrome (Beta). It was built with the help of com­po­nents from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Fire­fox, and some oth­ers. It is only cur­rently avail­able on Win­dows; though they are work­ing on the Linux and Mac ver­sions supposedly.

I took it for a quick test run ear­lier and I can say its fast and “min­i­mal” as to what they say. Although most of the key fea­tures are already in Fire­fox, I do like the “crash con­trol”. Here are the ones that have been highlighted:

• One box for every­thing — Web search. Web his­tory. Address bar. Sug­ges­tions as you type. One uni­fied box serves all your brows­ing needs.
• New tab page — Every time you open a new tab, you’ll see a visual sam­pling of your most vis­ited sites, most used search engines, and recently book­marked pages and closed tabs.
• Appli­ca­tion short­cuts — Use web apps with­out open­ing your browser. Appli­ca­tion short­cuts can directly load your favorite online apps.
• Dynamic tabs — You can drag tabs out of the browser to cre­ate new win­dows, gather mul­ti­ple tabs into one win­dow or arrange your tabs how­ever you wish — quickly and easily.
• Crash con­trol — Every tab you’re using is run inde­pen­dently in the browser, so if one app crashes it won’t take any­thing else down.
• Incog­nito mode — Don’t want pages you visit to show up in your web his­tory? Choose incog­nito mode for pri­vate browsing.
• Safe brows­ing — Google Chrome warns you if you’re about to visit a sus­pected phish­ing, mal­ware or oth­er­wise unsafe website.
• Instant book­marks — Want to book­mark a web page? Just click the star icon at the left edge of the address bar and you’re done.
• Import­ing set­tings — When you switch to Google Chrome, you can pick up where you left off with all the book­marks and pass­words from your exist­ing browser.
• Sim­pler down­loads — No intru­sive down­load man­ager; you see your download’s sta­tus at the bot­tom of your cur­rent window.

So after giv­ing it a spin, would I use it in my daily work­flow? Not quite yet. As noted, it is still in Beta and only avail­able to the Windows-user demo­graphic. It will be inter­est­ing to see where it goes for sure, or how peo­ple react to it as it approaches more and more to main­stream. That, and how Google would mar­ket it with their other appli­ca­tions and ser­vices.

That being said, I over­heard through the grapevine that Google’s inten­tion for releas­ing this is due the fact that Mozilla Fire­fox makes 85% of its rev­enue through Google Search. It does makes sense though. Whether that is totally true or only par­tial, its still a good idea if that’s the case. Why make some­one else money when you keep that money for yourself—right?

Another ques­tion that came to mind was: is it bad for every­one else, the every­day users? Not quite… yet. Unless every­one has been fol­low­ing Google’s blog, or are tech­ni­cally savvy and keep track of Tech news, the reach of Google Chrome’s release would most likely be by word of mouth between those in the Tech indus­try (for now). But when it does make its stake in the browser mar­ket share, it can be bad and good at the same time. Bad, that there will be another browser to add to the list to sup­port and care for by web­sites. And good, that it can be the one true browser to rule them all¹.

Update
Kevin Purdy of Lifehacker.com recently released some Beta Browser Speed Tests ear­lier today com­par­ing IE 8b2, Fire­fox 3.1b and Google Chrome 0.2. There are 3 impor­tant find­ings from his tests:

1. In terms of startup time, Chrome wins. On a cold start², Fire­fox leads the pack. How­ever, on a warm start where the browser has just been closed and reloaded, Chrome sur­pris­ingly takes the deci­sive lead.
2. In load­ing JavaScript & CSS, both Fire­fox and Chrome are near half of that of IE’s.
3. Last but not least, with regards to mem­ory use, Fire­fox is undoubt­edly the win­ner. But this might be arguable as can be noted in Chrome’s fea­ture set. That is, its abil­ity of “crash con­trol” which makes each tab load its own process, rather than a sole Chrome process like that of IE and Firefox.

1. Will there ever be one? I really don’t think so. That’s what’s good and bad about Tech­nol­ogy, there’s always improve­ment to be done and it is widely open for every­one to inno­vate. [↩]
2. Refer­ring to a com­puter that just has been turned on or restarted. [↩]