With much fanfare from the Internet camp, the Chrome browser made by the ‘do no evil’ Googlers, is now available for download and installation on your machine. Not only does it add another flavor to your browser palette (Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari and Opera being the heavy hitters), it is also designed to run smoothly on all of these mobile devices that I can’t afford (see Android for more information).

I spent about a half hour with the PC version of Chrome and can honestly say it is just slightly faster than Firefox in unofficial, general browsing tests. Chrome is about 10 megabytes total in size and will automatically import your Firefox or Internet Explorer bookmarks upon running if you so choose.It also takes the incredibly uncluttered and useful approach to a zenith with tabs being more prominent than the FILE | EDIT | VIEW menu which has been beaten into our software-using brains.

However, Chrome is RIDICULOUSLY fast when it comes to running the Web 2.0 applications that are littering the Information Superhighway. One product that simply flies on Android is the excellent and free Splashup, a Photoshop-esque image editor with support for layers. When working with multiple image layers in Splashup, I found Chrome much more responsive than Firefox. If you add Internet Explorer to the mix, it really makes me wonder why so many web sites demand that you still cling to that slow, plodding, crash-prone monstrosity in order to access their content.

Google also went all out with explaining how their browser works with today’s Internet in a very informative online comic by Scott McCloud. It helped me understand just what is going on in the background when my browser decides to take a belly flop, and how they believe they have fixed those problems with Chrome.