Google launches Chrome 3.0 -- should you care?

Chrome 3 is finally out, but the first reaction you might get when loading it is, "So what?" Yes, Chrome is fast. But it doesn't have much going for it beyond speed.

There's no doubt that Chrome is a speed demon. Pages load faster than any browser I've yet used, including the new version of Opera. But there's more to a browser than speed, and that's where Chrome falls short.

Google uses the same stripped-down design philosophy for Chrome that it does for the Google home page. For Web search, that's a good thing. For a browser, it's not. Where, you might wonder, is an RSS reader? Nowhere to be found. How about add-ins, like for Firefox? No, they're not here, either. Neither are features such as Web slices that you'll find in Internet Explorer 8.

Chrome 3 does add a few new things, though. The page that appears when you open a new tab has been redesigned so that it's more customizable, for example by hiding some parts of the page or by displaying frequently visited Web sites in a list rather than in thumbnails. You can see the new page below.

The Omnibox -- the powered-up address bar that's referred to as the Awesome Bar in Firefox -- gets a few new tricks as well. As before, it does double-duty and acts as both an address bar and a search box. In Chrome 3, it's been tweaked so that icons appear next to the list of sites that appear, making it easier to know whether each is a search result, bookmark, suggested site, or something from your history list, as you can see below.

Chrome 3.0 also supports HTML 5, and you can now apply themes. Below is a small selection of the available themes.

That's pretty much all there is, though. If you want full details, check out the Official Google Blog announcement.

With such a feature-thin browser, Chrome isn't likely to gain many adherents. And if it's a sign of what Google has planned for the Chrome operating system, it doesn't bode well for that release, either.