If you’re looking for more than the typical “Chrome is great” response to Google’s new browser, here are some of the ones I’ve come across that I think make good points and/or go into some depth. For whatever it’s worth, I think it’s pretty good — and it seems pretty damn fast as well. Will I make it my default? Not just yet.

– Walt Mossberg has a review of Chrome up at All Things D and seems to like it, but isn’t blown away (his speed tests don’t jibe with mine though, and CNET says Chrome beats every other browser).

– SEO 2.0 thinks that a Google browser could actually be a bad thing, for a number of reasons (some of them good).

– Jack Schofield at The Guardian notes that almost all of Chrome’s features (and even its name) are already available in other browsers, and in some cases have been for years.

– Matt Cutts, the Google blogger, has an excellent post up in which he responds to some of the criticisms (Google’s going to track me! Google’s going to know everything!) and questions about Chrome.

– Eric at Internet Duct Tape says he likes Chrome a lot, and it really is fast, but it’s missing some crucial things (ad blocker, etc.).

– Wired has a great in-depth look at the Chrome project.

As I said in my post yesterday about Google’s new Chrome browser (and as a number of others have also noted, including Kara Swisher and Mike Arrington) Google’s real target isn’t Microsoft’s Internet Exploder, or even Mozilla’s Firefox, but the desktop operating system market. As Fred Wilson points out in his blog post on the topic, Google’s focus is the “cloud” — i.e., Web-based applications such as GMail and Google Docs and so on — and for an increasing number of people (including me), the browser is just a window through which they can use a variety of Web-based services.

So the point of Chrome is to turn the browser into a better interface for those Web services and apps, by using a faster, custom-made version of Javascript, by isolating each site in its own tab so that it can’t crash the whole browser, and so on. Although some of these features appear in IE 8 as well (including the separate sandbox-for-apps approach) Nick Carr is right when he says that Google is the only company for whom the cloud is a priority, and the only one with the resources to totally remake the browser into a Web operating system — continuing a trend that Netscape started back in the first bubble.

But just when we’re all starting to feel rosy and cheerful about the bright future of a Google-powered Web OS, along comes Hank Williams (not *that* Hank Williams) at Why Does Everything Suck, who points out that for most people, Internet Exploder is working just fine — and not only that, but a surprisingly large number of people are still using IE6, which is five years old, and wasn’t even that great to begin with. Do any of these people care that Google’s browser will run Web apps better than their existing browser? Unlikely (if they even use Web apps).

Meanwhile, Matthew Gertner of Mozilla says he isn’t convinced that the browser is the best place to run Web apps. He works for the Mozilla Prism project, which allows Web apps to run as separate, standalone windows that mimic desktop apps, an approach similar to the “rich Internet application” model that Adobe is pushing through its AIR app, and Microsoft is pushing with Silverlight. There’s no question that the line between Web and desktop is blurring, and Chrome may well continue that process. But whether it is the ultimate answer — and whether the average Web user will even care — is still a pretty big question mark.

Update:

The Google blog now has the news about Chrome, which will be launched tomorrow. Kara Swisher says Google has ignited a new browser war with Microsoft, and Om Malik thinks that the mobile world will be one of Google’s main attack points. Harry McCracken, meanwhile, has a great list of 10 questions that the Google browser raises.

Update 2:

Om has a post with a response from Mozilla CEO John Lilly to the potential competitive threat from Google, which has been working closely with Mozilla. And Mike Arrington has some screenshots of Chrome that he got from the website (which was briefly up but is now down).

Original post:

The reliably excellent Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped has what appears to be pretty solid confirmation of a Google browser — known currently as Chrome — that is apparently in development at the Web behemoth. Phil got an email that included a comic from Scott McCloud, which describes the new browser in some detail: it includes several features that borrow from Opera (tabs above the address bar, a “home page” that features most-browsed pages and links, etc.), as well as what appears to be a new approach to the browser engine.

According to Ionut Alex. Chitu at the Google Operating System blog, the new browser will isolate each website in its own “sandbox,” so that if something goes wrong with one page it doesn’t crash the whole browser. Among other things, the browser will also have a “privacy mode” (known in some circles as “porn mode”) in which data about the browsing session won’t be recorded on the host PC — something Internet Exploder 8 is also supposed to include — and will include a built-in phishing and malware filter, as well as an enhanced Javascript engine.

Apart from all of these details, however, the thing that really interests me is the larger point made by Ionut, which is that Google clearly sees the browser as a form of operating system — just as I think the Mozilla group does, as I wrote recently after word of the new Ubiquity alpha announced by Aza Raskin, which is a kind of plugin that tries to tie a number of different Web apps together. Much like Mozilla’s “Prism” feature, the Google browser will also allow Web applications to run in a separate window that mimics a desktop application, and will include support for Google’s “Gears” service, which allows offline caching.

Although there will likely be some concerns raised about Google — the prism through which many people see the Internet — developing its own browser (will it build features that render its pages and search results better than others?), I think competition is overall a good thing. I can hardly wait to see some of the other features that Mozilla and Google and Microsoft come out with as the browser becomes a kind of OS for the webtop or “cloud” desktop.