Years ago, rumors made the rounds that Google was working on a web browser of its own. But then Firefox came out and Google seems to love the 'Fox folks (and in fact last week extended an agreement giving them cash and engineering help through 2011), so most figured the GBrowser had fallen off the table.

Imagine the industry's surprise then when Google Chrome was formally announced yesterday, abruptly introducing a fourth major browser (don't forget Safari!) to the rapidly fragmenting stew of web surfing apps.

The first public beta of Chrome became available for download just a few hours ago. I've been using it all day (and am actually composing this post using Chrome), and wanted to provide some (admittedly early) thoughts about the browser for those who want to crawl on the bleeding edge.

Chrome's big selling point will be of only minimal interest to the bulk of web users out there: a new architecture that, in a nutshell, compartmentalizes each tab along with its own process. The upshot is that if one tab crashes, it won't take down your whole browser, but will only crash that tab. Anyone who's had a dozen tabs or windows open at once and seen the whole browser go poof will likely appreciate this feature. (Security should be greatly improved as well.)

Design-wise, Chrome is familiar yet new. Tabs now appear along the very top of the window, above the address bar, and there is no text menu bar available at all. You can access a few simple options through an options icon, but otherwise, there are no traditional functions to be found. By default there's not even a home icon! (If you want to save a page, for example, you'll have to right-click it instead of going to the File menu.) It will take most users a while to adapt to it, but any web user should have minimal trouble doing so.

Easily the best feature of Chrome is its blazing speed. It's ridiculously fast, seriously. I almost couldn't believe it, but test after test showed that pages loaded about twice as fast with Chrome as they do with both Firefox and the beta of Internet Explorer 8. (Other tests have shown different results, however; so your mileage may vary.) Also good: I've had only one rendering issue with Chrome so far (the "insert link" feature with Yahoo's internal publishing engine; I had to finish this post with Firefox). Other than that one problem, pages look exactly how they're supposed to, making it comparable to Firefox in compatibility and light-years ahead of IE8's laughable, intentionally incompatible rendering engine. Still, I won't be able to use Chrome in day-to-day use, at least for now.

Chrome's default home page is unique, too. Check it out in the image above: Nine screenshots, dynamically chosen from the pages you visit the most. Not sure if it's a gimmick or really useful yet, but it's different. The history view is also impressive, better than any of the alternatives.

The real downside of Chrome is its immaturity. Some of Chrome's attempts at uniqueness just don't work: There's a weird URL auto-fill system that suggests search results (above history results) as you type. For example, as I type "CHR" to try go to "chrisnull.com," Chrome unhelpfully suggests "calgaryhealthregion.ca." I have never once found this feature useful and would prefer Chrome re-split search and the URL bar instead of combining them haphazardly like this.

Of course, features we now take for granted in many browsers are wholly absent here for now. There are no additional toolbars or plug-ins available yet: I can't really live without the Google toolbar's Autofill feature, and the lack of AdBlock and some of Firefox's other major plug-ins is soul crushing. Worst of all, there's no spell check feature, so if there are any typos in this post, I blame Google. (See update below.) Some of this may change with time, but Chrome is intentionally designed, like Google itself, with minimalism in mind.

There's lots more in Chrome that I'm sure I'll discover, but you might want to give it a spin yourself if only to get a look at what's to come. Download it for free (for Windows only, sorry) at this link.

UPDATE: Turns out there is a spell check tool, it just doesn't work on all sites/pages right now, which is why I missed it originally.

POLL: Are you into Chrome?