The launch of Google's web browser, Google Chrome, has been met with quite a bit of interest and hype. But why should you care?

Finding an alternative to Internet Explorer is one thing (see our article on alternatives) but what makes the launch of Google Chrome so important is that it doesn't require a technological luminary to guess where Google is heading with this: an operating system within an operating system.

Google has been making inroads in cloud computing with their free software that you can use on the internet — without installing anything on your own computer. Using Chrome as a central launching point/environment for this in the future is very likely.

The possibilities that this holds for the way in which we interact with the internet and use operating systems are huge. So as a step into a potentially revolutionary direction, Google Chrome is very important.

Let's look at some of Chrome's good points — and some of its crappy ones.

First, the good ones:

  • As I said above, the potential for changing the way in which we go about using our computers is huge.

  • Installation is very straight forward. It gives you the option of importing your bookmarks from Firefox, while also remembering your passwords.

  • Chrome really does load web pages faster than Internet Explorer.

  • Chrome has an extremely simplistic and minimalist layout, which frees up a lot of space to display the actual websites that you visit.

  • The landing page of Chrome displays thumbnail views of your most visited websites, much like Opera's Speed Dial and Firefox's Fast Dial plug-in.

  • It's an open source browser, which means that anybody can change, add to, and distribute the code behind it.

  • One of the biggest differences between Chrome and other browsers is that each tab loads 'separately'. In other words, if you have more than one tab open and if the website in one of them causes it to freak out, you won't be forced to close the entire browser. Only the offending tab will be shut down.

  • Chrome also comes with an Incognito mode. When this function is switched on, Chrome doesn't record the history of what you're visiting. Although this isn't exactly new, what is nice about this mode is that you can load a website in a new window with this mode activated, while leaving the rest of your browser running normally.

But it's not all good — see on page two why you might not want to get Chrome...

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