Chrome is a hugely significant move by Google as it extends further into our daily lives by providing the platform where we now begin and end our computing journey - the web.
It is also the latest front in the battle of the desktop PC, for so long dominated by Microsoft. By creating a browser Google increases its influence on our use of web software, search, advertising and ultimately all digital media consumption.
It's too early to take a definitive view on whether Chrome is the "Internet Explorer (IE) killer" and while my colleague and chief technology officer Paul Doleman has been involved in pre-public Chrome betas for some months, the public version is only just available and so I'm focussing here on privacy issues and the browser's open source credentials.
On the latter point, I have to say that Chrome is a superb internet citizen. For example, it picked up the fact that I had IE 8 and then seamlessly integrated all the functionality that I liked, including Facebook assets, all my history and elements that make the browsing experience personal and productive.
User experience is very positive. I like the very clean interface which you can personalise and the visibility and accessibility of recent activity. Organisation and display of this search information is quite intuitive and Chrome "learns" from your recent behaviour.
From a web development perspective, I like Chrome's ability to pick any web page element, right click and inspect the elements source code quickly and easily. This highlights in a nice and structured fashion how the page is constructed and so makes web development easier and problem-solving faster.
With the primary issue, privacy, I think Chrome has made significant advances with its Incognito mode. We have barely scraped the surface of the privacy issue up to now and in the next decade I think we face a huge challenge with levels of cyber-crime dwarfing current criminal activity.
Chrome claims to stop websites sharing our information and the spread of malware but is it really anonymising our online behaviour? I looked into the caching levels on my PC, checking the file structures at all levels to see if caching was visible and the good news is that I could find no caching and no IP addressing. As far as I could measure, there also seems to be no traffic going to Google either.
While the public beta is considerably faster than the ones my colleagues have been testing privately, it's still slow. Right now, after five tabs are opened, the browser starts to grind. I'm sure Google will sort out the threading issues pretty promptly but I'm surprised they are there at the start.
How does it compare to Firefox 3.0 or IE 8.0? Take one key example - IE8 beta 2 has context sensitive, right-click accelerators. I can highlight the key name and address on the page and I can email it, map it, search Wikipedia, translate and more. IE8 and Firefox with Ubiquity does this now.
Google Chrome has to catch up and fast!
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