Every once in a while, a rare while, I come across a product that makes me say, “Wow, they actually thought about this.” I’m pleased to announce that today it happened again, thanks to a new web browser called Google Chrome. Read on for my brief review of the browser and some of the cool features that only geeks will appreciate.

My initial impression is that the boys in the backroom at Google really paid attention to how they browse the web. It wasn’t until I saw Chrome for the first time that I realized that our so-called modern browsers are still clinging to a 1998 paradigm of web browsing. It’s like they are focused more on standards compliance and some kind of “performance” metrics than they are on the end user. Chrome takes user experience to the next level. The Chrome team realized a couple key things about your average web browser user that the others just don’t get:

1. When you open a link in a new tab, you ought to open it in a neighboring tab, and not on the end of the list
2. Yes, there are a handful of web sites that I visit the most, and yes a start page with those screens on it is very useful
3. When I type in the address bar “slash”, 9 times out of 10, I really mean “slashdot.org”, not “http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/09/03/0119236.shtml” (why would anyone want to auto-complete that?)
4. Fast page loads are back baby!
5. When I have lots of tabs open, and one of those tabs misbehaves (runaway JavaScript, a naughty Applet, etc.), I do not want the rest of my tabs to suffer.
6. Each browser tab is actually a separate process, meaning a crash in one tab no longer affects your whole browsing session.

And the list goes on. I’m writing this from Chrome, and I am very happy. I haven’t had a browser get out of my way and just give me what I want in a long time, and I’ve been a 10-year proponent of Mozilla browsers like Mozilla itself, Galeon, Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox, Seamonkey, etc.

Good job Chrome team!