Today I installed Google Chrome Beta on our Windows Vista testmachine in our office. No Chrome for Macs yet. 
What bugs me: you only get a web downloader and not the full install files. So you have no real control what happens behind the scenes when you install the browser.
Otherwise the installation went smooth. Well, after installation, I was greeted by a German browser, with no possibility to convert Chrome to have an English interface. For some people it is certainly sufficient to have apps install in their native language, but at least I would like to choose the language of the software I use (I prefer British English).
Chrome renders websites fast, really fast. That’s impressive. It obviously has a Flash plugin already embedded, as Flash apps, Youtube etc. work out of the box without problems. I have no idea what the guys and gals at spiegel.de test, because they wrote “we surfed the net for two hours and didn’t find a site which was not working”. Well, it took me just five minutes to find out Chrome doesn’t have a Java plugin nor a possibility to get an appropriate plugin to display the Wordle-website.
Normal HTML-rendering looks good and seems to be really standards compliant (well, should be when using the WebKit engine). And the speed of the rendering is really impressive. Faster than Safari and a lot faster than Firefox. That’s really impressive for a beta version.
The interface of Chrome is reduced and slick. At the moment it looks a bit like a clone of Opera.
I really hope there will be adblockers available, but I guess not, because Google lives from web marketing. 
So I will only use Google Chrome as a test browser (like I do with Internet Explorer). At least for my personal preference Firefox is still the better choice: I have control over what the programme does and can adjust the browser to my liking (e.g. web developer’s toolbar, ad blockers like NoScript etc.).
Tags: Google Chrome, Web
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