Just when you thought you had enough browsers to choose from (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror), Google enters the fray with Google Chrome (currently only for Windows, and, naturally, it's a beta).

This rather impressive comic (http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/) introducing the browser and the rationale for building it is really worth reading, and seems to show that they're doing things slightly differently from the other browser builders, with what seem to be solid decisions on the speed and security front. But having played with it, there are a few things to dislike about it.

For one thing, I can't find any way to put a normal search box on the GUI, so you're forced to use the blended search+URL bar, which I find a bit confusing. More seriously, the cookie handling is rather scary. These are the options:

• Allow all cookies (the default)
• Restrict how third-party cookies can be used
• Block all cookies

In other words, there's no option to have the browser ask you whether to save cookies for specific sites.

The about:memory URL shows the kind of thing they've been focusing on (small memory footprint); it shows you the memory profile of all the browsers you currently have running, including IE and Firefox.

It also has the same bugs as Webkit/Safari (predictably), especially with JQuery UI components. There's no option to change the UA string (as far as I can find), so debugging these things on sites which already browser-sniff to work around them is going to be difficult. But it does have a neat little reporting mechanism for buggy web behaviour; it'll take a screenshot of the current page and send it off to Google with your explanation and the URL, automatically.

My biggest hope for this is that Google will put some developer time into bugfixing in the Webkit engine, which will help clean things up for Safari (and possibly Konqueror) as well as Chrome.