We’ve taken Google’s new shiny browser for a spin, and we’re ready to share our experience. First off, this is a beta version so many things are likely to change, and oversights (which do exist) addressed. Nevertheless, Chrome is looking like it will be a serious contender for No.1 Web surfing app. Now, in its current state you can see that Chrome is geared toward the internet enthusiast, someone who has a bit of experience and knowledge of how the web works.

This is obvious from the get-go, as one can tell by its elegant, minimalistic interface, designed to give as much space as possible to the webpage itself, with many elements such as the status bar and bookmark toolbar which are present in IE and Firefox being reduced to temporary pop-ups of sorts, and others removed altogether, such as the menu bar.

Some nifty perks which web boffins will like are things like the element inspector which displays the html code around a link or button and the ability to easily add custom search-engines, as opposed to say, Firefox which has its search engine scripts downloaded from their development site. The downside is that non-experienced users will find this method a little more difficult, especially as the active search engine to be used is more difficult to switch; there is no separate search bar, Chrome has a unified “box” where you type both URLs and search strings, with only the default search engine showing up. Hopefully this will be addressed come release time.

Another noteworthy technical aspect is that each tab launches its own process, in order to prevent the whole app crashing in case of a malfunctioning website, in theory at least. In practice, we’ve found that killing the mal process will kill the whole browser. Credit where it’s due though, we’ve not been able to spot any other apparent major bugs.

The settings, available through a button to the right of the address box, are pretty bare-bones as of now, but do include everything that is expected of a next-generation browser: a password manager, tab settings, popup blocker, network settings, etc.

A nifty point of interest is that Chrome offers the option to load either the homepage, restore previous tabs automatically, or load a predefined set of pages. This is useful for the fellow who likes to read 3 newspapers and check the stock market every morning. One nitpick about the settings though – it uses IE’s proxy settings, instead of separate ones like Firefox, this is an inconvenience if the user wishes to set up multiple proxy configurations based on the browser, but again this is nothing that can’t be fixed by the final release.

Bookmark support is pretty basic right now as well, while Chrome does have bookmark folders and a toolbar, there is no manager thereof per se, and no support for separators and the like. Another problem is the lack of any plug-in support whatsoever, we do suspect that it shan’t be a problem for long however, considering the open-source nature of the browser.

One more interesting feature is the incognito window, which when activated saves no browsing history, no passwords, and cache and cookies are immediately cleared upon closing. Google however are kind enough to inform you that it offers no protection against tracking websites, ISP logging, keyloggers, secret agents and people standing right behind you...

Finally the big question – does it load web pages faster? Tests were inconclusive, while download rate seems roughly the same as FF and IE, page loading does seem faster, thanks to optimized code handling and the V8 Java VM.

Google’s Chrome, while obviously still very much a work in progress, does show a lot of promise, and if Google can work out the minor flaws, and polish the features a little more to appeal to the casual surfer, it will be a rival not to be taken lightly by the other heavyweight web browser developers.