Google makes a lot of great products (gmail, google maps, picasa) and a few that haven’t quite caught on (orkut, knol).

Well today they are jumping into the shark infested (with laser-beams!) waters of the browser wars with Chrome (you can download it here). The big players are, of course IE (version 8 beta 2 is out which is pretty sweet) and Firefox (version 3), but the market goes deeper.

You have:
Safari
Flock
Opera
Seamonkey
Maxthon
Konqueror
Galeon

Those are just the bigger ones…heck there are a lot (about 10% of surfers if you can believe it) who still use Netscape which they don’t even make anymore.

So why is Google entering this market? If I were to guess, this is step one for a complete Google OS. Basically if you control the browser you control how people see the web. You can give them your start page…your services…etc. Considering Google’s world is the web its a nice fit.

There are a million articles out there that detail the whats and the whys. The point of this article is how does it feel. In today’s “cloud based” world, you spend a lot of time in the browser so how it feels is really important. As a web developer/designer it becomes even more critical because your sites depend on the browser to be shown to the world.

My first impression? Clean…fast…simple.

The first thing to notice is that the tabs are at the very top and each one has its own address bar (they like to call it the omnibox). This makes a lot of sense because it allows the tabs to work separately from each other. Something I always want to do in other browsers is drag a tab and create a new window…in Chrome you can do just that. Very nice.

Another thing that you immediately notice is how fast it is. It is crazy stupid fast to load. Honestly, the other browsers act like a 3-toed sloth compared to this thing.

Most importantly, all of my client sites seem to be working nicely…even the ajax and javascript heavy guys seem to be rockin’. Can’t ask for more than that.

Now one thing that is a bit weird is because all of the tabs are basically different processes, your Task Manager will show about 100 Chromes running around. Whether or not it uses more memory than the other browsers is yet to be seen, but so far it looks to be as big of a memory hog as the others…

I am still getting used to it, but overall it just has a nice, friendly feel that makes me want to use it. Little animations here and there, the resizable text boxes, the nice downloader give it a nice polish (and this is the beta!). Knowing Google, it will probably be in beta till 2012, but its definitely a nice beginning.

Will I replace my other browsers (I usually vacillate between FF and IE8)…not sure. I am gonna make it my primary tool for a little while and see how she goes. So far though, I am impressed.