David J. Garcia

Google just launched a new, built-from-scratch browser. If you hadn’t heard about Google’s “Chrome” yet, here’s what you should know:

• It’s a new browser choice, not just a new interface.
• It’s open source. Anyone can download and play with their own copy of the code.
• It uses separate processes for each tab, so an errant site in one won’t decimate your entire session.
• Since each tab is a separate process, you can pop tabs in and out at will. I can’t tell you how much I love this!
• It’s super fast. The way I use Gmail has permanently changed. Now when I open, archive, or tag something, the change happens instantly.
• The user interface is clean and logical.
• By default, Google logs the same sort of information from your address bar that it does when you use Google.com, but you can turn that off. It doesn’t really log anything else (unless you opt-in to error reporting).
• Targeted ads are a possibility, as with all things Google. I haven’t seen them yet.
• It’s new. And beta. This means there’s not a lot of websites built to attack it yet. It also means that security holes that do exist may not have been discovered and fixed yet. However, the underlying structure of the code is safer in general than other browsers.
• My desktop now features a Gmail shortcut, which opens like an application, in a stand-alone window without the extra web-surfing stuff.
• Unfortunately for the FireFox addicts, there’s no extensions yet.
• Yes, the license agreement previously included the boilerplate about giving Google a right to distribute your content. But that’s gone. It was a mistake and it’s been fixed. Any complaints about that are out of date.