Google Chrome for Mac is ready for prime time

If you've been waiting to try Google Chrome for the Mac until the software matures, now's a good time to start. With the release of the recent beta, Chrome gets the one basic feature that it had been missing: A bookmark manager. Chrome has been stable and fast from the beginning, and now it's ready for daily use.

Last week, Google introduced a significant new upgrade of the beta version of Chrome for the Mac. In addition to the bookmark manager, the new beta adds support for extensions.

For me, the most attractive features of Chrome are its speed and stability. I've been using Firefox as my primary browser since well before Version 1 in November 2004. But Firefox has become slow and prone to crashes, at least on the Mac, and I got tired of its weaknesses. Still, I stuck with Firefox because I liked the alternatives even less.

With Chrome, I have a fast, stable browser again. And Chrome has some additional features to make browsing pleasant and productive.

I have noticed a few pages that don't work in Chrome. It's like the early days of Firefox; Chrome is my favorite, but I need to have a backup browser ready and standing by for use a couple of times a day on pages that don't work in Chrome. As with the early days of Firefox, I expect this problem will diminish and disappear as publishers and Chrome developers work on compatibility.

If you want to stop reading now, and get Chrome for yourself, I won't mind. There isn't really a lot more to say about it beyond what I've already said. It's stable, it's fast, it browses the Web, you can keep bookmarks and manage them, and that's really all that matters from a Web browser.

Still here? OK, I'll tell you a little more about Chrome.

It has a clean and uncluttered user interface. Instead of a separate address bar and search bar, Chrome combines the two into a single space it calls an "Omnibox." When you start typing in the Omnibox, Chrome suggests results based on searches of your browsing history and web search history. If you enter a URL in the OmniBox, Chrome goes to that Web page; if you enter words, Chrome does a search on those words.

The other visually striking feature about Chrome is that the tabs are located above the OmniBox, rather than below the address bar as on other browsers. Honestly, I don't think that's a big deal, but it makes a big difference to some people, who either love it or hate it.

Under the hood, Chrome is designed for stability. Each tab is a separate process, and if one hangs, you can close it and keep working in the other tabs.

It supports extensions, like Firefox does, and developers recently added support for the two extensions I consider essential. The first, Xmarks, is a browser bookmark synchronization service that works across Chrome, Firefox, and Safari running on multiple computers.

Google has its own bookmark synch service, which is actually pretty slick, storing its bookmarks in Google Docs. Unfortunately, it only works with Chrome, at least for now.

My other essential extension is 1Password, a password management tool. The Chrome extension isn't fully implemented yet, but it has the most important feature: It automates logging in to Web sites. In the next few weeks, developers Agile Web Solutions expect to implement the other features of 1Password for Chrome, including generating new passwords, adding new logins to the database, and "Go & Fill," which not only automates logins, but also automatically goes to a URL first, with one click.

Google maintains three public versions of Chrome: The stable track; the developer track, which is theoretically highly unstable; and the beta track, which is somewhere in between. Like all Google betas, the beta version of Chrome is stable enough for daily use. The developer version is also stable, enough so that I've been using it as my primary browser for several weeks, ever since the developer version got support for a bookmark manager. Last week, Google added the bookmark manager to the beta version, which will encourage people more cautious than I to start using Chrome.

If you, like me, have been discouraged with the browser choices available for the Mac, I encourage you to try Google Chrome. It's ready for prime time now.

For an alternate look at Google Chrome for Mac, and recommended extensions, see this article from my colleague Rob Griffiths: "A closer look at Google Chrome beta 2". Based on his recommendation, I'm going to install FlashBlock, which blocks Flash on Web pages until you press a button to start the Flash playing. Flash is awfully unstable on the Mac, and FlashBlock makes browsers faster and less crashy.

Also, FlashBlock kills auto-play videos on Web pages. Auto-play videos are evil, every time one starts playing, Satan claps his little hands with glee.