Yes indeed, this is a Google Chrome BETA review. I saw an article about chrome and I wanted to test the thing for myself. 

I immediately went to http://www.google.com/chrome to download myself a copy.

Google Chrome is based on parts of Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari and is OpenSource. The first thing we notice when installing is that the installer starts downloading the actual files, this happens quite fast even with my bad wireless connection. But why is it downloading stuff instead of just including it in the installer. Is it hiding something? It could be hiding that the BETA is huge, it is taking almost 90Mb of diskspace. The executable is small but some data files and installers take huge amounts of diskspace. It isn’t located in Program files like other applications, but in Application Data/Google. But let’s cut them some slack, it’s still a BETA, the final release’s filesize will be much smaller. 

We open it and, well see for yourself :

 

Chrome Screenshot

 It’s amazing, very nice, one of the best looking apps I’ve seen this year. It feels very light but it’s just the same as any other browser so you can count on +-26.000kb memory usage for each tab, cause chrome manages tabs in separate parts of the memory for security (sandboxing). This is quite unique.

Chrome has the functionality of Firefox and Safari it downloads plugins extremely fast. It has a download manager as well as a “save to” function. It also renders files with the speed of Firefox 3.

So to keep a big story small, It’s as fast as firefox, it’s a software beauty, but as it is now, it’s very high consuming on system resources. But it’s definitely worth a testride and keep in mind that it is a BETA the final version will probably be much more impressive. A BETA for Mac and Linux will be online soon. I will inform you all when this happens and of course write a final review then as well.