Google has finally released it's much anticipated open source web browser Chrome. Currently, Microsoft's IE dominates the web browser segment capturing around 70% of the user base, closely followed by Firefox, Opera and Safari. Mozilla foundation has recently introduced the version 3 of its popular Firefox browser, and Microsoft has already announced the development of Version 8 of IE. With the launch of Chrome, the race to capture the web browser market has heated up. Chrome is based on WebKit toolkit on which Safari browser is built. Chrome will be available free and Open Source under BSD license. At present, Google has released the Windows version (for XP and Vista). Linux and Mac versions are in the pipeline.
Chrome: Google's Operating System
I have tested Chrome on XP machine, and can safely say that Chrome is going to be the Google's Operating system on Internet, blurring the line between your desktop and browser. The installer itself is less than 1/2 MB in size, which downloads and installs the actual browsing software (Approx 7MB). The installation was smooth and bookmarks and other settings were automatically important both from IE and Firefox. I must admit that page rendering and download speed in Chrome is noticeably fast. Thankfully, most of the common keyboard shortcuts of Firefox are supported in Chrome.
Interestingly, each tab in Chrome is handled by a separate process. The advantage of this approach is that in case any tab hangs the other tabs are not affected and browser doesn't crash. Only the affected tab is killed. Unfortunately, in the current version you have to manually configure this option. Flash is working on XP machine, although there are some reports of flash not working fine in Chrome on Vista platform.
Currently, add-on and extensions (plugins) are not supported in Chrome. Google has announced the availability of API in coming months that will enable third party developers to create add-ons and plugins for Chrome.
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