The new browser from Google came out yesterday. Seeing as the news was out that it used Apple’s WebKit as its rendering engine I was hoping for beautiful Mac OS font rendering on Windows but sadly that’s not the case. I understand why they did it, there have been enough Windows users complaining about the fonts in the Windows versions of Safari and iTunes, but it would have been good to have a solid Windows browser with gorgeous presentation-ready fonts.

Aside from that first impressions are good. Apparently fast (the only kind of fast that matters), simple (in a good way), takes up minimal screen space for its own elements, and a very cool “about:memory” page that even reveal the memory usage of other browsers. Cheeky feature!

SunSpider reports a total test run time of its Javascript performance tests of 2246.2ms. On my machine that’s 1.64 times faster than a nightly WebKit build, 1.9 time as fast as Firefox 3.0.1 and 2.8 times as fast as Opera 9.51. That pretty incredible improvement seems to give real world results too; Google Reader, unsurprisingly, is very responsive indeed. Google Chrome