If you’re one of the people who follow me on Twitter then you know I’ve been gushing about Chrome which is really opposite of how I originally felt about Google’s foray into the browser business. When I first heard about Chrome we had just finished a website at work and had spent hours running down glitches, browser inconsistencies and wackily implemented standards so it was no surprise that I wasn’t looking forward to having to bug-fix for another browser. That is until I actually GOT my hands on Chrome.

Chrome is fabulous. The new site didn’t break at all. What’s more, it only took a fraction of the time required by Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari to load the page. There were no weird PNG transparency issues like in some of the browsers, no weird way of implementing the box model, and no unexpected crashes no matter how hard I tried to break the thing.

Out of the virtual box, Chrome comes fully functional with the Flash Plugin already installed and a full implementation of Google’s new Gears project.

So far everyone I’ve talked to has good things to say about Chrome with the only bad points being the lack of a Mac version at this date and the inability to use plugins (but there are enough tools and toys built into the browser to keep most geeks happy for some time.)

Currently Chrome is only available for Windows but a Linux and Mac OS X distribution will be available soon. To download Chrome and try it yourself visit google.com/chrome