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Google made their new Chrome browser available for download on Tuesday at http://www.google.com/chrome . It's a two stage install - you download a small setup package off the site which then downloads the rest of the install after you've opened it. All standard stuff, although it's the kind of approach normally used for 50MB+ downloads, not little 7MB packs like this.

So far I've installed this first beta on two machines, a brand new Vista laptop and an aging XP desktop. I'd already got Mozilla Firefox installed on both machines, so during the Chrome install it asked whether it could import all of my various Firefox bookmarks, favorites etc. to get me started off. The laptop had little or nothing to copy over so that bit of the process finished in a blink and I had Chrome up and running in a matter of seconds.

The XP machine was a different matter however...

The Google internet browser has been rumored for so long that a few commentators were starting to think that the folks at Mountain View were becoming content to let Firefox gradually take the market, but that was perhaps just wishful thinking. Today's announcement of the new Google Chrome not just tops Internet Explorer (hardly difficult) but answers many, if not most, of the problems that us Foxophiles currently have with our own particular favorite.

At the time of writing we've only got a single screen shot, and the Chrome comic, to show us what to expect, but what we can see looks fantastic. The screen shot doesn't show much but then, as with all things Google, that's not particularly surprising. In a Vista/OS X world, Google has always kept it's offerings looking very minimalistic and that seems to be what people want - "forget how it looks - just look at what it does!".