Last Tuesday, Google launched the beta version of their new web browser. Google have also created a comic book to explain some of the more technical aspects of their new open source browser. In a few words, Chrome is fast, and benefits from a minimalist and stable interface.

Chrome uses components from Apple’s Webkit rendering engine and Mozilla’s Firefox and also includes its own Javascript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications. In Chrome, each tab runs in an  isolated “sandbox”, so that, if a tab crashes, it will not affect the other tabs or cause the whole browser to crash. Chrome also integrates Google Gears which allows web apps to run offline. It also features a stealth surfing mode named “Incognito” which prevents Chrome from storing information about visited web sites.

The video below demonstrates some of Google Chrome’s features:

Among the hidden secrets that will appeal to the geekiest, you may be curious to try typing “about:” in the address bar, followed by any of the keywords “memory”, “stats”, “network”, “histograms”, “cache”, “dns” or “plugins” (all without the quotes). I found the latter to be very interesting as it details supported media formats, including Flash, XAML and Silverlight.

Three essential features I found missing were:

• a tab manager, which could either be in the form of a “speed dial” à la Opera showing thumnails of all open tabs or in the form of a cover flow view;
• the ability to export bookmarks or synchronise easily with an online bookmarks service such as delicious.com;
• a print preview.

• you can easily subsribe to RSS feeds within the browser by the click of a button;
• numerous extensions available.

From a web standards compliancy perspective, it’s interesting to see how well different browsers perform when submitted to the Acid 3 test.

Although none of the most widely used browsers today manages to score full marks, Opera comes in closest with 84%. Google Chrome, with 79%, does reasonably well, ranking between Safari and Opera. Internet Explorer 8, on the other hand, fails miserably to support the current web standards. This shouldn’t really come as a big surprise given Microsoft’s continuing endeavours to introduce new proprietary technologies rather than adopt or contribute to improve existing ones. Despite these results, Internet Explorer’s share of the browser market clearly demonstrates that, while support of web standards is a major concern to web developers, consumers tend to opt for the more feature-rich browsers or are satisfied with the one that comes pre-installed with Windows!

It will be interesting to see how well Chrome fares in comparison with Mozilla’s Firefox that gathered a little over 8 million downloads on launch day. As the graph below shows, however, it did take almost a year from the initial Firefox 3 beta launch before the adoption rate started to rapidly increase.

While still in beta, a week after launch, Chrome has reached a relatively stable 1% of market share.

Chrome Houry Usage Stats