In a sudden but ultimately unsurprising announcement by Google, a beta version of a new web browser, called Google Chrome, is now available for download. Just when you thought the browser market couldn’t get any bigger, along comes the search giant to offer a unique take on how a web browser should work. And thankfully, they do deliver on at least that part of it.

Google is certainly not new to bringing unique products to the mass market. With both web-based and desktop applications ranging from virtual environments to 3D modeling software, it’s not surprising to me that a web browser was inevitable.

Their goal is to build a fast, rock-solid browser that may not have the power of extensions like Firefox, but instead a multi-threaded core that won’t cause the entire browser to crash when one website decides to go rogue, plus the ability to run multiple processes of JavaScript at the same time. Each instance of a web page is sandboxed, in that the address bar (“omnibar”), navigation buttons, and page render area are all independent of each other. While appearing repetitive at first look, this design greatly helps the overall stability of the browser.

I gave Chrome a test run, and was very pleased with its speed, both how quickly it loaded up and how fast pages were rendered. The latter should be expected, as it runs off the lightning-quick WebKit rendering engine. The visual design of the browser (literally called a chrome in programming lingo) is minimalistic but pleasant to use and not distracting at all.

Memory usage is also handled well. Because each tab is an entirely separate process, closing down a Chrome tab destroys the whole process tree and clears up that memory instead of leaving it possibly fragmented like other browsers. I also found it interesting that you could go look at exactly how much memory and CPU power each web page used in real time through Chrome’s internal task manager.

Currently only a Windows version is available, but Mac and Linux versions are coming soon, and even a version for Android is in development, which I’m excited for. In addition, the entire project is open-source.

I’m left with a very good impression of a new web browser when I previously thought any more in the market would simply get ignored. Although I don’t think I would personally use it as a primary browser, namely due to the lack of extensions as stated above, I still find it a valuable program for testing web devleopment in the WebKit rendering engine. I also think that many of Chrome’s best features will eventually work their way into other major browsers, and Chrome itself will continue to improve in the features department.