A new browser alternative to Internet Explorer and Firefox

Great news! Google has just released another killer application that could rock the way you surf the Web.

Google Chrome is a browser that is built from ground up with open source application framework - Webkit, combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.

Some interesting facts about Google Chrome:

The default page is no longer a blank page but rather a page featuring the four most used search engines and the user’s nine most visited Web page. Looks like some sort of integrated artificial intelligence is in place.
Security features are a bundle as Chrome continously contact Google to update a list of known malware sites to warn the user. You can really be assured of a safe browsing experience with Chrome.
Has its own JavaScript engine, V8, to power web applications with multi-threaded efficiency.
A tab is actually a browser by itself. So yes, each tab has it’s own URL space.
To overcome common crashing problems, the browser tabs get their own process rather than tabs sharing processes which frees up memory and reduce memory fragmentation.
Supports browser extensions allowing it to make hybrid apps similar to Adobe AIR
Has an Opera-like dashboard start page and auto-completion.

Looks like Google Chrome is not just another simple web browser. If it does take off well, many people will opt for Google Chrome as their preferred browser.

Also check out a comic drawn by Scott McCloud on how Google Chrome works at the back.

But are browser alternatives a good thing? For web users, definitely. But for web developers, now they will need to test their codes against Google Chrome as well. Imagine when one day, the breakdown of web users using browsers are the following:

Chart created with Google Chart API. Check out How to create Pie Charts Online

Web developers / testers are going to have more work as they need to test against three different types of browsers. Don’t forget that there are also the various versions within each browser that needs to be tested against too.

In general, the browsing experience with Google Chrome is quite good. I believe I will continue to use it more over Internet Explorer. One thing that I dislike is the home page which collects information and displays my most visited sites and I can’t find a way to disable it. This would mean that I better not go to some 18-SX or 18-SG sites as it will be displayed here as the top visited site. Muahaha! I wouldn’t want my wife and son to see which bad sites I visit most. It’s still a good feature to have though. Guess I’ll just use IE for all the non appropriate sites. For normal web surfing, facebooking and using web applications, I believe Google Chrome is the way to go from now on.