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!".

Is the new Google Wave going to call time on Twitter just when that particular Web 2.0 property has become the app to have open on your desktop at all times? I think there's a strong possibility, but only if Google starts to make the much needed changes in its approach to new product marketing that will ensure future success. More on that in a minute.

Don't get me wrong though, I love Twitter as much as anyone, but I've really started to find the whole 140 character restriction thing a bind, even if that's pretty much the point of the exercise.

140 characters; about the same length as a search engine site meta description snippet. It's a great way of practising your Adwords and SEO skills, but it hardly amounts to a conversation, and that's the big problem. Twitter, and the deliberate string length limitation, are tailor made for the SMS/instant-messaging/text-speak-forum-comment mentality where a lot is said, most of it gossip and nothing in any particular detail.

Even those heavy Twitter users who aspire to marketing guru status tend to just post lifestyle comments of pretty limited interest mixed with direct links to their latest blog posts - hardly the cutting edge thinking you'd expect from them.

Overall, it's a pretty thin experience and one that I've quickly tired of - a bit like subsisting on a diet of nachos; tasty initially but you soon long for some real meat.

Enter Google Wave.

Microsoft's new Bing search engine went live today, replacing both MSN.com and Live.com search (they redirect to the new site) and we took an early look at the new beta to see if it matches up with Microsoft's pre-launch hype.

Our earliest feelings are that Microsoft have really hit the spot this time - Bing.com looks just right and returns exactly the results you'd expect from a serious Google competitor.

First of all, they've taken the notion of Universal Search and then really added to the experience. Google searches always feel corporate clinical where the new Bing results pages look like they've been prepared by people for people.

And it's not just the easy-on-the-eye image intensive look of the whole thing - there's some really innovative new functionality going on under the hood.

Almost immediately after the launch of Google Chrome a storm started brewing about a part of the user agreement that claimed rights over "any Content which you submit, post or display on or through" the browser. Specifically, the End User Licence Agreement (EULA) claimed "a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."

To say this was broadly worded would be an understatement and indeed, on Wednesday, Google altered the text, leaving those rights in the hands of Chrome's users.