Yes, Google has a web browser and it’s now available for everybody (on Windows, at least) to download. It is called Chrome, and the team at Google is accentuating one aspect that it hopes will outduel all the other web browsers: speed.

Google claims Chrome will be the fastest web browser on the market, and will make everybody’s web-based experience a little quicker. Add to the the simple import features that Chrome offers and the small footprint (7 MB total) it leaves and Google thinks Chrome is primed to be the sleekest browser on the market.

Chrome, like Firefox, is open source and Google is (quite slyly) welcoming Firefox and IE developers to incorporate any of Google’s code they want into their own browser. The argument? Anything that makes the Internet easier to access is good for Google.

Google is also quite up front pitching their own version of a “porn mode” called “Incognito.” IE8 and Safari have their own versions of this mode, which allows users to browse (ostensibly for a spouse’s gift) without any cookies or files being left for others to discover what you’ve been looking at. Porn surfers now need not live in fear.

I’ve tried out Chrome very briefly over on my PC, and there are a couple of features I’d like to see implemented, but it seems like a fine browser. I noticed one site didn’t load up all of the pictures, and there is no progress bar (telling how how much of the page has loaded) so it’s hard to tell what kind of problem is going on. There have been some reports of JavaScript problems, and some YouTube clips I tried were dying out after a few seconds. I’m sure there are other issues, but everything else seemed to work fine for me.

The URL bar is a lot like Firefox 3’s “Awesome Bar,” in that users type in a URL and it will suggest possible outcomes for what you’re looking for. But one primary difference is that Google’s URL bar also incorporates Google Suggest for search terms, so it will suggest both URLs and Google search phrases. Of course, if you type anything longer than a couple of words, it will suggest only search terms, but shorter one to two word phrases may suggest both URLs and Google Suggest search term ideas. There is no separate bar for URLs and searches.

Immediately, I’m interested in using Google Chrome on my netbook due to the small size and promised quickness of the browser. I’ll have to test it out to see if, at the very least, it’s preferable for this sort of format. Larry Page has been running the browser on an old computer to test it out, so Google is guarding against the sort of testing problems on older or less powerful machines that plague Microsoft, among others.

But the word on the street that has everybody the most excited: it is fast. Much of this is undoubtedly due to the fact that a lot of Firefox users who have tons of useful plugins are using it, and I haven’t clocked it myself since I’m running OS X and it’s tough to compare, but increased speed will get a lot of people interested, myself included.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 2:27 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.