A first look at Google Chrome

Just played around with Google Chrome. First impression: Wow! This is definitely going to encourage development of other browsers as well!

It feels lightweight, fast for JavaScript applications, and offers some nice features (I especially like the possibility to open an “anonymous window” which will forget all cookies etc. when being closed without being forced to delete all other cookies as well.) Tabs can be dragged out and dropped back into the browser, something I’d always wanted Firefox to be able as well.

Each tab runs within its own process and Chrome offers a “Task Manager” (Shift-Esc), which will display memory usage, CPU usage and bandwidth consumption for each tab, which I consider very handy.

Chrome is available for Windows only at the moment, but is expected to be released for MacOS X and Linux as well. I am really curious how this is going to develop and if this is going to really affect “the Internet as a whole” (I really believe Google has gained enough market power to push their products).