Google has released its experimental browser called Chrome, a new type of browser built on the Webkit rendering engine.

Google have said that this is designed to be a whole new type of browser, built around the concept of web ‘applications’ as opposed to web ’sites’.  The idea is that the new breed of sites are now applications that you spend a lot of time in, as opposed to simply sites that you visit briefly.

The major change is that each tab in now running in its own CPU process, which means that there shouldn’t be the issue of one site’s processor-intensive Javascript or some plugin (Adobe I’m looking at you) locking up or bringing down the whole browser.

From the Google Blog announcement

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends — all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

My first impressions are very positive.  It’s fast, very fast.  They’ve optimised the heck out of the Javascript engine.  You can see the comparison between Firefox 3 & Chrome’s Dromaeo test results: Firefox’s 1983.40ms compared to Chrome’s 574.60ms.  That’s almost 1 & 1/2 second’s difference. Sure that was a fairly unscientific test, I wasn’t controlling for other processes, but the massive difference is indicative of a major improvement in JS performance.

So here’s what I’ve found so far:

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.  Of course it’s on US Pacific time, so it doesn’t start until 5PM Australian EST.  So don’t forget to get Firefox & be part of the world record.

From the Mozilla Developer Centre:

Whenever we’re asked “when is Firefox going to be released” we endeavour to answer to the best of our abilities, but the truth of the matter is that we’ll only ever ship “when it’s ready”. We have a lot of indicators that help us understand when the product is ready for release: feedback from our pre-release milestones, excitement in the community and the press, availability of compatible Add-Ons, and a large active beta community helping us ensure that the release is compatible with all the various sites on the Internet.

After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 - the best web browser, period.

Plus the 3rd Release Candidate is out today.  Unless you’re on a Mac you don’t need it though, as it contains only a single change to fix a Mac-only bug that was causing the system to hang or crash at startup or shutdown.

Mozilla has released the second Release Candidate for Firefox 3, if you had RC1 installed it would have come as an automatic update, otherwise you can get it from the download page.  The release notes for RC2 are here. 

There aren’t any new features, this is a pure bugfix release. Ironically though, there are more ‘known issues’ in RC2 than there were in RC1 (21 vs 17). 

The final for Firefox 3 is due later this month I believe.