Google chrome on linux

A colleague from uni who now works for google wrote a brief post about google chrome, which has just been released for linux and he is working on it.

I decided to grab a copy and try it out.

I am very impressed with it so far. It is basic – lacking plugins, so no flash or java, the UI options are almost non-existent and apparently printing does not work. Despite being basic, I am really liking it.

Chrome is incredibly fast -not only do new windows and tabs open instantaneously (wheras firefox has a bit of a delay), but the contents of windows is rendered so much faster than in firefox. Even very complex javascipt sites (such as a few I use at work that are a real pain because of the large tables and lots of js) load so much faster. Using chrome makes me feel like my broadband has got faster – which is a little bit of an odd feeling.

The current release is a development build, so expect problems and crashes if you try it out – I for one will probably be seeing how much I can manage to use Chrome for, as the speed increase is fantastic!

It installed easily on Debian Lenny and Ubuntu Jaunty – 32 and 64 bit debs available 🙂