So here it is, fi­nal­ly: the le­gendary Google browser.

And like ev­ery­thing else that Google puts out, it is a glo­ri­ous­ly in­cred­i­ble piece of work. It has the best char­ac­ter­is­tics a piece of soft­ware could have: it’s sim­ple, fast, re­spon­sive, and stable. I’ve been run­ning it for just a lit­tle while now, and while We­bKit’s ren­der­ing (espe­cial­ly of fonts) is slight­ly dif­fer­ent from Gecko’s, ev­ery­thing works just about the same as in Fire­fox… it’s all just way, way faster. Open­ing new tabs is faster. Us­ing Gmail is faster (thanks, no doubt, to the new V8 JavaScript engine). Writ­ing posts is faster. It’s re­al­ly quite in­cred­i­ble… in fact, pos­si­bly one of the most im­pres­sive open-source de­vel­op­ments to date, right up there with Fire­fox 1 and the Lin­ux ker­nel. Give it a spin your­self and see.