Chrome is a new web browser developed by Google using open source code, you can download it here for Vista/XP.

Released on 2nd September it is still in early beta and it remains to be seen what slice of the browser market share it will be able to secure over the current top browsers of choice: Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.

First impression is that its fast, with a clean minimalist design. When you open a new tab, you get a page showing thumbnails of your nine most-visited sites, plus blue search and bookmarks boxes on the right. If you closed any tabs within the past few minutes, you’ll also see a yellow box containing your three most recently closed tabs, which lets you skip directly to the site you want. Google hasn’t yet created themes for Chrome however others have at Google Chrome Themes, Deviant Art, Chromespot.

Unlike Firefox Chrome doesn’t have an array of add-ons available to enhance its behaviour however there are ways you can use add-ons to Chrome, via bookmarklets which are little pieces of JavaScript that you can store as a bookmark, and when clicked upon, they run as a kind of miniprogram. To add a bookmarklet to Chrome, first display Chrome’s bookmarks bar, which appears just below the Omnibox. (Pressing Ctrl+B toggles the bookmarks bar on and off.) Once you do that, when you get to a page with a bookmarklet link, drag the link to the Chrome bookmarks bar. Once it’s there, to run the bookmarklet, click on it. Here’s a list of bookmarklets that are supposed to work with Chrome.

People generally get attached to their choice of browser, it will be interesting to see if people will give Chrome a go and make the change to it.