Got a chance to play around with it on Ubuntu yesterday night… It is not as noticeably faster than Firefox…. But it is significantly better at managing large amounts (20+) of tabs than Firefox.. Chrome is the first mainstream Webkit Browser for Linux.  Most people won’t have used Konqueror as Firefox is the most popular browser on Linux. Overall, it is a great foundation for an excellent browser future.  It is in my top 3 with Safari and Firefox.

Chrome for Mac/Linux beta is a free download, works with Intel Macs running Leopard or Snow Leopard or Linux PCs.

A group of Dell engineers announced Chromium on Friday of last week, outlining that it will be made available via a free and simple download for use alongside Dell’s popular Mini 10v ultra portable Netbook.

The version from Dell can be downloaded (8GB memory stick needed) and does function with Wi-Fi or wired connections. A couple of problems with this version is that wireless takes from 5 – 10 minutes to actually start working, although it does work.

When running Chrome OS from a USB key rather than a virtualised version running in VMWare, it runs far better and gives insight in to how the OS could function next year when launched. The OS it’s self is far from being finished and there isn’t much support out there yet, but it is functional now with the right hardware. If you have a Mini 10 and a spare 8GB USB Flash drive then check out Dell’s community blog for full instructions on how to install the Chrome OS.

The main focus of Google with this new OS has being on Speed, Simplicity and Security.

It takes about 7 seconds to to go the log-in screen. And another 3 seconds to log in to your application. Now this is called speed. Google is still working on making it faster. :)

All data of Chrome OS is in the cloud. So every application is a web application. There are no native applications. This is what gives it simplicity.

As on data is on the machine it self, if you lose your machine, you just get a new one, and it works. As everything is a web app, the system is secure but not fully secure. If any application is in danger of being corrupted by malware, Chrome has been designed to reboot itself, after which a clean version of the OS is downloaded. Nearly all user data will be stored in the Google’s cloud computing service and will be encrypted and sychronized constantly between the netbook and the cloud.

I would post a detailed review as soon as i test it out.

If you want to try it out you can you can download a VMware build directly from web site gdgt or the image is also available on Pirate Bay.

You can go through various FAQ on the Google Chrome Blog.

SPDY does not replace HTTP, but rather creates a session between the HTTP application layer and the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) transport layer and basically augments HTTP. It speeds up web page downloads by using several techniques, including allowing multiple simultaneous HTTP requests per TCP session, request prioritization, and compressing the data to cut the number of packets. It does not replace HTTP headers but it overrides HTTP’s data transfer formats and connection management features.

According to software engineers Mike Belshe and Roberto Peon in Google’s research blog the protocol was tested in the laboratory by downloading each of the top 25 websites 10 times. The test environment simulated home network connections, and used a special web server and a Google Chrome browser prototype. The tests indicated SPDY gave page load times up to 55% faster. But SPDY’s performance in the real world still needs to be evaluated.

Lets see how this works out in the near future… :)