Everybody and their Grand-Aunt are currently blogging about the new Google Chrome Browser so I'm joining the gang. First off, it's a beta so I'm not going to knock it for some of the various rendering problems I encountered; I used it on some exisiting sites I have developed with cross-browser consistency for IE7 and Firefox 3.0 (don't get me started on 3.0.1). For example, I'm experiencing what seems to be an unusual interpretation of the box model, problems with a Javascripted footer floating up a little from the end of a page, typical Googlesque background coloring of form fields, and textboxes having a color border placed around them when active, etc.

One question begs to be asked: why would anyone base their new browser on the rendering engine of a browser (Safari) used by about 3% of users (mainly designers), at best? I discovered this nugget when attempting to find out why sites working in IE7 and Firefox 3.0 were not rendering properly in Chrome. It's not like there was a gun to Google's head to get this completed, so why not base it on a popular rendering engine?

Check out the comic book introduction to the new browser. This is a really slick architecture, the way browsers should be built. Plus it's open source... hopefuly we won't have to fix the bugs ourselves :-O Seriously, if Google can iron out the rendering inconsistencies and make it as consistent as Firefox 2.0, they are on to a winner here. Why nobody thought of updating the existing single-process architectures before now is beyond me.

Note to Microsoft: when can we expect Silverlight and Photosynth support for Chrome? Just asking :-|