The new Google Chrome browser ( http://www.google.com/chrome/ ) was released Tuesday, 9/2. They discussed its design in a very informative but techie 38-page comic book presentation ( http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html ).

To access the chat, I had to get a newer (not-yet production, "Early Access", SE 6 Update 10 RC) release of the Java plug-in ( http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/ea.jsp ). Google help ( http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/t....py?topic=14683 ) has documented this need.

-On installation, you can import your bookmarks, passwords, and settings from Firefox or IE.
-There is no menu bar, no status bar, no title bar. There are tabs, a bookmarks bar, and an address bar. This leaves most of the screen for whatever site you browse to.
-The address bar or Omnibar is much like Firefox's Awesome Bar - typing into it searches your history and bookmarks. In addition, Google incorporates the search bar into this. By default, they set Google as the search engine, but this can be changed.
-Font settings can also be changed.
-Google includes a "Most Visited" page with thumbnails of the 9 pages you've visited most, allowing easy access back to those sites.

-Google Chrome is a beta release, as are most Google products.
-It is Open Source. This means others can take the code and improve on it or use it in other products
-It's based on the Webkit browser engine, used also in the Safari browser. WebKit was developed by Apple based on the KHTML engine used in the Konqueror browser (Linux - KDE GUI). Website statistics appear to see it as Safari.
-Google's team wrote a totally new Javascript engine for this that they've called V8. It processes Javascript much faster than the current engines in other browsers.
-It's only available for Windows XP and Vista initially. Mac and Linux versions are planned.
-It needs the newest (beta) Java plug-in. See above for link.
-There are no extensions yet, but that capability is planned.
-A big one for me: no Roboform! Roboform also does not work with the Safari browser.
-You can open a page in "incognito" or private browsing mode to keep it from saving any traces in cookies or history.
-Architecture: The tabs are shown at the very top, emphasizing that each tab is a separate process, rather than being within one browser process as with the tabs in other browsers. This means that a problem in one tab doesn't affect the other tabs. Chrome has its own task manager (right-click on unused portion of tab area) so you can see which tabs are using which resources, and kill any problem tabs separately. Because of the separate processes, I've seen Chrome using more memory than with Firefox 3.
-By default, the home button isn't shown. You can add this.
-There's no history button. Control-H brings up the history.
-There's no Print button. Control-P brings up Print.
-You can drag and drop tabs to rearrange them. You can also drag a tab out of the current window to create a new window, or drag tabs from one window to another. I also dragged a URL in from Firefox to create a new tab.
-You can open a group of tabs by right-clicking on the containing folder in your bookmarks.