I downloaded the brand new web browser from Google today. It is a beta version and is called Chrome.

Chrome’s stripped down interface maximises the viewing space on the screen. It looks like Fisher Price had a hand in the design – big rounded buttons and basic icons, which is very pleasing to the eye and fresh.

It 0ffers the ability to search in the address bar – which is cool. I think Firefox does this too. Chrome will provide prompts for Web pages and search terms, these are quite slow to pop up I found.Users are presented with a graphical list of the most recently visited Web pages when the application starts up – an innovative and cute design feature.

Tests conducted by others have found that it does well against IE but is not as quick as Firefox or Safari.You can do some cool stuff with the tabs – change the order, pull them out of the window so that they are stand alone instances of the browser and put them back in. Tabs operate independently which prevents one page bringing down the whole browser – a problem I often encounter with IE.

Google explains why they got into this space here.

This is clearly a competitive play with regard to Microsoft IE, which still accounts for 75% of the browser market. It will allow Google to maintain the integrity of its search engine – Microsoft could for example make changes to IE which favoured its search engine over Google. Google retains control with Chrome.It also enables Google to get closer to users and will provide them access to a different type of user information, which provides the basis to their advertising business.Chrome offers an incognito mode – users can surf and withold their usage data from Google.

It will be interesting to see how Google will promote Chrome to the mass market. To most consumers IE is THE web browser – these users haven’t thought about why they use IE, they just do. It comes pre-loaded on their new machines – it does what’s required. It’s familiar and easy.  Google have added a download link for Chrome to their famously minimalist home page.

Chrome is only available for XP and Vista at the moment, Linux and Mac to follow.

There are a few things missing from the application, such as a progress bar. Google will obviously be developing this further – this is an open source app which is based on some of the other open source browsers but which according to Google represents the next generation of browsers and an up to date platform for Web applications.

A quick scan of blogs and media shows that Chrome has had a generally positive reception.Interestingly, Google pre-announced Chrome using an online comic, which you can see here. The comic features the RL Google design team.

Tags: browser, Chrome, Firefox, Google, IE, incognito, Search