Google Chrome

The first reviews of Google's new Web browser are in, and the overall consensus is: Chrome is pretty darn nice.

The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg calls it a "smart, innovative browser" that is "rough around the edges."

I downloaded the browser myself a few days ago and am still developing impressions about it. Upon set up, chrome automatically imported all of my internet explorer bookmarks and settings. It includes many new features like incognito, that is stealth browsing mode. When you launch a new incognito windows, you get this message: "Pages you view in this window won't appear in your browser history or search history, and they won't leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito windows. Any files you download or bookmarks you create will be preserved, however." Interesting. It includes some warnings, including one that says to beware of "people standing behind you." The incognito browser window has different coloration than the regular window, and has a picture of a be-hatted and be-jacketed G-man character. Nice touch.

The address bar doubles as a search field. Google is the default search engine, of course, but you can switch to another easily.

In Chrome, each tab behaves as a separate browser. Not only can the order of tabs in the browser window be shifted around as in IE 7 and Firefox 3, but each tab can be dragged out of the frame to become its own window.

When you first launch Chrome, or open a blank window or tab, you're greeted with thumbnails of your most recently viewed Web pages, a nice touch that Google "borrowed" from the innovative but little-used Norwegian browser Opera. You can click on each to go directly to that page.

In my first few moments of use, when i was browsing around different web pages to learn more about it, when one of the Chrome pages crashed. I saw an amusing error message that read, "Aw, snap! The web page you were attempting to load is unresponsive."

Overall, however, Chrome really is a very solid piece of work for a "0.2" release.

But still Mozilla Firefox remains my favourite with its incredible features !

Subodh