A few us have been using Chrome here in the office today a and first impressions are generally good.

I’m not going to run down the whole feature list, only what was obvious to me right away.

• Pages render at lightening speed, it feels faster than FireFox.
• Element inspector – a firebug style debug tool built in.
• Omnibox – makes sense to just have one input box in the top bar although I do keep entering URL’s without the HTTP:// which returns a google search. Habit I guess.
• Ability to drag tabs to a new or existing instance of Chrome.
• Crashes don’t kill the whole app, only the current tab.
• Easy install, imported bookmarks & history effortlessly.
• Speed dial – loved this in opera, nuff said.
• I haven’t come across any sites it has broken yet although I know there are some found by others.
• Bookmarking functions seem a little basic (thanks Rich).
• It looks and feels great!

Interestingly, it identifies itself as “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“ 

I’m curious about the Safari bit, wonder if this matches the Chrome render engine most closely.

I have set it as my default Windows browser for now, will report how I get on.

Following on from yesturdays web comic teaser the world is eagerly awaiting the full release of Google’s (Open Source) Chrome browser, which according to the Google Blog should be at some point today. There are already some screenshots floating around the web and I’m as interested hell to get my hands on it.

From a web developers point of view I’m fascinated by the potential impact this could have on browsing and the Internet. Google don’t have a habit of doing things by halves and from the initial information, Chrome is no exception. Only time will tell.