Just downloaded and installed Chrome, the new browser from Google. Unfortunately, you can only download the browser if your current browser is configured to identify your computer as a Windows system. Chrome is available for XP and Vista only at the moment, if you try accessing the Chrome page (www.google.com/chrome) with a OS X system (I only tried Safari, but I guess it’s the same for Firefox), you only get an option to sign up for updates on the development for *NIX and OS X systems.

Installation was easy enough, as a minor setback, you had to download an installer first that downloads the actual setup files afterwards. It was amazingly quick though, especially as I assume there’s lots of traffic hitting the download page currently. Setup itself worked perfect on my virtual machine (XP SP3) and was rather quickly done.

First impressions of the browser: Not much to configure, very nice, very clean GUI. Chrome asks whether you want to keep Google as your default search engine at the first start, which I allowed. If it encounters a site that requires a plugin (Flash in this case), it askes whether you want to download the plugin or not, and after allowing that, downloading and installing the plugin was fast and without any problems at all. While testing, I found that popups were blocked without problems, however layer ads still show up – annoyingly as ever.

I’ll add screenshots later on, and will write some more about Chrome as soon as I convinced the IT to install it on my PC at work….