Google Chrome Review review

Everyone was taken by surprise when the Google Chrome web browser was announced yesterday. Even more surprising was the news that the browser would be available today as a public beta. After much sitting around hitting the refresh button on the download site, Computer Shopper has finally managed to download the browser to give it a first review.

Google's promise with Chrome is a web browser that's designed for today's internet. That may be the case, but it looks rather like a conventional web browser. OK, so the tabs have been inverted, but everything that you've come to expect from a modern web browser - bookmarks, stop and restart buttons, and the address bar - are all present and correct in their usual place. The only thing that's obviously missing is a home button to load your favourite website.

Google purposely hides that, preferring its New Tab page instead. When you launch a new browser tab, you're presented with a page of thumbnails of the most commonly visited websites. There's also a list of your most recent bookmarks and a search box for your browser history. If you prefer, though, you can use the Settings page to turn on the standard Home button.

Chrome does a good job with tabbed browsing. New to this browser is the ability to drag tabs out of the browser window to create new ones. Of course, you can drag and drop to organise multiple tabs inside a single window, too. File downloads are also handled differently to other browsers. Instead of a download manager, file download status is shown at the bottom of the tab the download was started from.

When a file's completed downloading, you can either choose to open the download folder (the location can be configured) or simply drag the icon to the location you want it in. The downside with this method is that it can be hard to find downloads if you've got lots of tabs open. Fortunately, Chrome gets round this with its own Download page. Selecting it from the menu or pressing CTRL+J (same as for Firefox's download manager) you can view a searchable list of the files you've downloaded over the past four weeks.

Search is integrated into the web browser. When you start typing into the address bar you get a list of options including to search Google (you can change the default search engine) for the term. It also provides some additional recommended terms. For example, tying in WinZip also brings up the term 'WinZip free download'. You're also presented with a list of matching websites from your history, although Chrome's handling of this isn't as good as FireFox 3's.

Perhaps the best feature of Chrome, and the part that makes it a web browser designed for today's content, is its built-in task manager. In this browser, every tab runs as its own process and every web application, such as Java apps, run independently. In the event that a website causes your browser to crash, you can simply choose to kill the defective tab or web application. There'll be no more having to restart the whole browser with this application, and it's better than Firefox's simple method of giving you the option to restore the last session. It also has a brand new Java virtual machine, which is designed to run Java applications faster and more securely. Until we've had a bit longer to test this feature, it's hard to comment on.

Chrome is currently far from perfect, though. Using it with several common websites we ran into problems. Egg.com's Money Manager still requires Internet Explorer; Microsoft's Outlook Web interface only gives you the basic view, not the full Internet Explorer version; LogMeIn refused to work properly and only gave us a remote control window that updated irregularly with screenshots. Obviously, as the browser gains in popularity these problems should decrease, but for now you'll still need to use another web browser.