If you can’t wait to read this review, head on over to  this page to get your hands on it.

Well, I’ve had it loaded up on my iMac for about 48 hours now, and have already come to some conclusions.  First off, it’s fast.  Like a dress coming off on prom night fast.  This version hasn’t been officially tested yet, but my (very) unscientific testing showed it to be 10-15% faster than Safari 4 or Firefox 3.5.  As far as rendering content, I haven’t noticed any issues, and when I personally tested it using the Acid3 test, it scored a perfect 100/100.  So, bottom-line, as far as the nuts and bolts of internet browsing, a have to rank Chrome on par or better than the current Mac offerings.

Acid3 Test Results

Let’s move on to talk about interface and features.  The first thing you’ll notice is the “tabs on top” style layout.  This is unique among browsers in that instead of displaying the tabs below the bookmark bar, they appear where normally the title bar would be.  This would be a plus if it actually gave you more viewing area, but because they don’t push all the way up to be level with the “close-minimize-resize” button, it really isn’t adding that much.  One thing I do really like about the tabs though, is the ability to “drag out” a page.  This feature is already in Safari, but trying something similar in Firefox will result in a shortcut on your desktop.

Dragging out a tab

Something else borrowed from the Safari interface is the history based home screen that allows you to see a panorama of your most visited sites.  A nice improvement over the Safari version, though, is the ability to display the sites in a list style format.  Also on the Chrome home screen you can see recently closed tabs, which is a nice option to get back to a page you accidently closed.

On the “things like Firefox” list is the ability to apply themes to customize the look of your browser window, with a multitude of designs and colors available.

One thing conspicuously missing from the browser is a search field, located in the upper right corner in both Safari and Firefox.  Instead, in Chrome this feature is provided by typing non-urls into the address field.

Overall, I think that if you are 100% committed your current browser, I don’t see any “must have” feature in Chrome that will drive you to switch. However, if you are looking for a browser that offers a good mix of both Safari and Firefox, I recommend giving Chrome a try.  If nothing else, by downloading this non-official release version, you can say you were one of the first to use Chrome on a Mac.

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