Google's browser: Google Chrome

Dinoboff

It is clean and fast.

It is based on Webkit:

Official Build 1583
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

http://tools.google.com/chrome/

Dinoboff

C:\Users\...\chrome.exe --app=http://lussumo.com/community/

NickE

it's fast, but nightly webkit still beats it -- and that was the nightly from mid-june. although I'm not complaining; it's a pretty cool browser.

yes; I'm obsessed with efficiency (in modularity), and web browsers, and many other mostly inane things.

Stash

Anyone with a Gmail or Google Apps hosted email account has got to try this browser out. I'm not over-exaggerating when I say that it feels snappier using Chrome/Gmail than Outlook, Thunderbird, Opera M2, Windows Mail or Apple Mail. Can't wait to see how the other browser makers respond to this >=]

squirrel

No Adblock. No Flashblock. Eats memory like a goat. NEXT!

Simonb

i know i should not say this but it has a porn mode!!!

Max_B

Bah,
Based on Webkit but way behind Safari3. No CCS3 @font-face, rounded corners are buggy, no text shadow…
I know this is a first release…
Nevertheless I'm glad webkit got such a tender. It's the best web engine so far.

Stash

squirrel, give it a chance mate, I don't believe Firefox 0.9.3 had any blocking in them either. Actually, come to think of it, Firefox 3.0.1 doesn't either, it's all extension based! It is open source, so I'm sure someone will do both of those things in the not too distant future. Strangely enough, the ads aren't bothering me nearly as much due to the browser not slowing down as much as fx/saf/ie.

It does eat a lot of RAM, but less than firefox (for me - I'm a heavy tab user) and it keeps running far smoother. Don't forget that it is currently still a beta (that's not an excuse for things, merely a mitigation ). Also, with RAM as cheap as it is, I'm glad to finally start seeing some programs to put it to good use. I don't care if something uses lots of RAM if it performs well, which Chrome does so far for me. I have 4GB, but I know most people don't, however, even cheap new PCs come with 3GB nowadays.

Max_B, I hear you on the older webkit base, but hopefully they will update this to a more recent one before the "final 1.0" product - no reason they shouldn't (is there?). I still prefer it to Safari though. There's just something clunky with Win/Safari that I can't quite put my finger on. It's not a bad browser by any stretch of the imagination, but...

My only fear with Chrome is that it'll go the same way as GoogleTalk did. I remember testing out GoogleTalk when it was launched along side the relatively unheard of Skype a few years back. There wasn't all that much difference between the two then, now it's a completely different ball game. Still, fingers crossed they keep this as an actively developed project.

Another thing I really love about Chrome is the tab management. Being about to pull a tab out of a window to create a new window and then move others to that window is really powerful I find. I can't wait for that behaviour to turn up in fx/saf 4

squirrel

Yeah, I keep hearing about how awesome Webkit is, and I wonder why nobody has yet managed to turn it into an obviously superior browser.

Stash, you hit on a big point: FF largely is the extensions. I am concerned about speed and memory and ACID3, but the extensions are what keep me loyal to FF. And I am very restrained compared to some of the extension whores out there.

IE and Opera and Safari and Google haven't quite figured that out yet. FF will have to start looking pretty crappy before I give up Flashblock and my other toys. As a developer it totally infuriates me how bad their SVG support is but as a user I'm pretty happy with the day-to-day experience.

Good luck to Google, competition is good and all that. I've just seen too many web browsers as "promising betas". It's relatively easy to make a browser look awesome when it's only 80% finished. That last 20% will kill you every time. That's true for a lot of projects but it's 10x as true for browsers. The web is a tangled mess with a million little corner cases and catching them all is what turns a svelte fast simple browser into a bloated train wreck.

sirlancelot

I like the looks of it and how the interface blends in with Vista. But looks are only going to get me to use for 10 minutes max; after that I'm back to FF3 and its glorious extensions :)

Dinoboff

If it add something like the delicious extension that replace FF bookmark with my delicious ones I could use chrome instead of FF3. I would miss Firebug and NoScript, but It would not stop me.

Max_B

@stash tab moving to an from window is already in Saf3.1.2/Mac (use it every day but did not check on S3/Win, my VM is off right now).
IMO Safari on window is still the ONLY way to test web site against CSS3 features (some mentioned above - dynamic fonts are so cool!), nevertheless, I agree it's slow launch (must load quartz, for font antialiasing and such) and crash often.

Wanderer

I'll try Chrome when they release the Mac OSX version.

Stash

Max_B I hadn't even thought to try the tab management with S3, but you're quite right it does work - however, it has that irritating OSX finder quirk that dragging the tabs in certain directions results in different behaviour. In this case, if you drag the S3 tabs left or right first you can no longer tear them off the window, you can only move them left/right along the tab bar of the originating window. You have to move the tab up/down first, then you can tear it off to create a new window, move it to another existing window or move it left/right along the current tab bar. Also, Chrome has less/snappier animations with the tabs which just makes it feel a lot more responsive to me.

I really do hope they update webkit in Chrome soon, it would be superb to have some decent competition in the browser space.

The more I use it, the less I find I miss the extensions in Firefox. That's not to say I wouldn't feel happier with Adblock Plus, NoScript, Firebug, Delicious, Stylish, Greasemonkey, IETab and Gspace What would be really interesting would be if someone wrote a plugin for Chrome that enabled native Firefox extension support...

Max_B

BTW, Should I mention that Webkit nightly get 100/100 at acid3 test where FF3/Chrome are in the 60's?

Stash

Interesting, for me, acid 3 under Vista Ultimate x64
fx 3.1b1pre — 85 Gecko/20080906062345 Minefield/3.1b1pre
O 9.52 — 84
Chrome 0.2.149.27 — 78 (Official Build 1583 — AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13)
S 3.1.2 — 75
fx 3.0.1 — 71
IE8b1 — 18 (dismal)

Not bad for a beta methinks Chrome also fails the quickest, always useful ! Webkit nightlies aren't working for me...

Stash

Chrome 0.2.149.29 — 79 Official Build 1798 — AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.29 Safari/525.13

That was worth a wait LOL

Max_B

@Stash rather cryptic, please elaborate

Stash

There was a Chrome update, so I reran acid3 and it added a single point. Looks like it's still running the older webkit as well. I posted the other browser results in answer to your question as to what they were scoring on acid3

Dinoboff

acid3 must be testing V8, updating Webkit will not help.

Dinoboff

I personalty switch to Google chrome this week-end. The UI is just so much better. Other browser look so bad now (IE7 is not so bad on vista but is so slow, Safari is meant for testing or as a refuge for Mac users on windows so it does count).

Finding the bookmark and the tab back button history were not that intuitive but is so clean as a result that it is ok.