One more net browser to recon with and a mighty one as well-from Google labs, The Google Chrome. It is quite impressive of the fact that the beta download is available at the same time as their launch announcement unlike many other, much publicized product announcements.

Click here to download Google Chrome

Once installed, it loads up amazingly fast when compared to Microsoft IE and Mozilla Firefox. The most impressive is the simplicity of Chrome’s Interface. Chrome offers better real estate on the screen and the default blue theme is cool to the eyes.

Even though tabbed browsing has become common with Firefox and IE 7, the idea of dragging tabs to form new windows or merge different windows into tabs is simply amazing. This would actually be extremely useful when running a web application and when the user wants that application to be in a separate window not interfering with the usual browsing.

Application shortcuts even help to create an icon for the web application on the computers desktop or the start menu.  You would be able to access your web application with these shortcuts without the need for opening chrome.

The incognito mode simply opens a new browser window with its own tabs. Whatever you browse here doesn’t get cached on to your hard drive. Great way to get away with your browsing history from parents, girlfriends, wives and what not! Even though I am not a parent yet I wish that Chrome gets a parental control implemented on its browser with accounts.

I also liked the instant book marking feature which simplified the marking of my favorite sites. Almost the same as firefox, but a bit easy to understand the process.

Chrome also makes it easy to import your settings and saved passwords from your existing browsers. I was able to migrate from Firefox and IE on my PC within a matter of seconds.

Safety online being a huge concern, Chrome also adds in safe browsing where it notifies the user visiting an unsafe website. I could only see the effectiveness of this feature using it for a much longer time. Wish there was a day where I could forget Anti virus software where the browser takes care of everything rather than counting on countless third party applications.

On the whole using Chrome for almost a couple of hours, I never felt it is slow or unstable for a beta version. It simply rocks and pretty fast too. If a beta version can be this good I believe the final version would be much better. Hope there would be a final release unlike Google’s Internet Messenger – Google Talk! These days it has become stylish to have an application on a prolonged beta stage.

Now why is Google getting into the already saturated browser market  How much ever we hate it, we still stick on to the bloated slower and the default Internet Explorer on Windows, many first time users don’t even realize the existence of third party browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari(from Apple) and many others. While all the browsers have been fighting on speed and features I believe Google would take a different approach apart from just offering speed and features.

The day is not far away when the OS is nothing but just a browser. Computing would become less complicated with just one simple browser running on access devices. All applications would be online and any device that could run a browser would also run your applications on your personal space online. By then the internet bandwidth would quadruple and everything would be instantly accessed.

Google foresees an immense potential in creating a browser and letting users subscribe its online product services. Google Chrome is just a stepping stone in the right direction for creating the next gen platform just like Microsoft of yesterday. Google is sure to show Microsoft and the masses, the windows of the future and Chrome is just the glimpse of the future of the net and computing.