[ Music ] >> Seth Rosenblatt: Chrome for Macs has only been available in a half baked development version until now. Hi I am Seth Rosenblatt for download.com and today we're taking a first look at the new Chrome Beta for Mac. It lacks some key features that it's Window's sibling offers but after 29 updates to get the dev build Beta ready there's no doubt that Chrome launches fast and loads sites fast. At least in our casual tests it's at least as fast as Safari and perhaps faster. Firefox not even close. Like any good browser Chrome will ask to import your bookmarks when you launch it for the first time. After that it offers all the familiarity of any other major browser. Navigation controls are on the left, the bookmark bar is just below. If you're new to Chrome it might take awhile to get used to the tabs on top and the lack of a status bar. While the home button comes activated by default you have to go to preferences to turn on the toolbar buttons for the page and tools menus. If you're used to the all powerful address bar on Firefox you won't notice anything different on Chrome. Safari's a different story and they still haven't updated their URL bar with search abilities. Depending on your system and what your homepage is set to Chrome may launch faster than Safari. Our job script tests comparing the 2 web kit based browsers also showed that Chrome was 1.6 times faster than Safari and 1.8 times faster than Firefox. Although keep in mind that this relates only to job script speed on this particular MacBook Pro. While a few people find that Safari is faster most seem to be getting quicker loading times from Chrome as we are. The Mac Chrome Beta is missing several major features. It doesn't offer extension support although that's coming and it's anticipated to be in the stable version that's expected in January 2010. It also lacks book mark synching, the bookmark manager and the cookie manager that are functional in the Windows version. But hey themes, there are plenty of skins, sorry, themes with which to skin your browser. Overall Chrome Beta isn't much different from the development build right now but more people might be tempted to try it with a name change and there's no doubt that it makes for an excellent quick look up browsing tool. [ Background music ] >> Seth Rosenblatt: For CNET I'm Seth Rosenblatt with a first look at the Chrome Beta for Mac.
