Google released its browser named Chrome this afternoon. After downloading the tiny file (474kb) and installing it, I tried visiting a few sites and they all rendered very fast. CSS support is great in this browser.
Then, I visited my website to see what the user-agent string would be displayed as. I was on Windows XP at the moment. The user-agent string was this:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13 |
Okay, I tweaked my browser display code to recognize the Chrome browser, so you can check it here. You should get something like this:
google chrome browser detect on aruljohn.com
The browser comes with Adobe Flash Player 9 out of the box (unlike Firefox), so you don’t have to install it. Java runtime isn’t installed and I’m not sure if that can be done at the moment.
One of the things I like most about this apart from the speed is the Chrome Inspector. Right-click on any page and select Inspect Element. It will show you a multi-tabbed display of the DOM elements, beginning with html and body. This is very useful for debugging.
chrome > elements
Selecting the Resources shows a graphical display of the time and size of each components of the current webpage.
chrome > resources
Yes, there are Firefox add-ons/extensions for this, but I think its great that Google included this in its web browser. Its a boon to those who use Firebug on a daily basis.
As of now, there is only a Windows version, Mac users will have to wait for a little more while.
Go ahead and download it here.