Yesterday I have received an e-mail from Google about the beta release of Google Chrome for Mac. The absence of Google Chrome on Mac OS X has been bugging me since the release of it on the Windows platform. Being a browser whore I switch my default browser from Safari to Firefox to Opera and back quite frequently. I have even tried Camino and Omniweb shortly. For Chrome I once downloaded a nightly developer build but wasn’t very much happy with it.
Now that it is officially released to the public I just opened up my Mac and downloaded the beta. It just installed quickly, imported my Safari bookmarks and was ready to go. Since then I have been using it for all my browsing, which is mostly products from the big G including Gmail, Google Tasks, Google Reader, Last.fm and my custom wordpress installations. Chrome on Mac seems much faster than any other browser I have ever used and feels mature. However we don’t have the newly release extensions, I don’t have Gears (because I am Snow Leopard) and can’t use offline Gmail, and Google Calendar and Wordpress Turbo. It is also interesting to see that there is no Bookmark Manager thus I can neither delete nor rename a folder I created in my “Other Bookmarks” folder.
With all these missing parts, I am sure Google Chrome will catch its Windows sibling quite quickly and we will enjoy the speed of Webkit and the available extensions to mimic what we do on Firefox quite soon.
I am really happy to be able to use Google Chrome in a non-virtualized environment that belongs to me and expecting further updates as soon as possible.