Some days ago, I was told that Google had released a beta version of their Chrome browser for the GNU/Linux operating systems, all in middle of a discussion about how much Failbox sucked — er, I mean Firefox.

So, I downloaded a Debian package, installed, ran the application, and it crashed on my face right after trying to show the first-run page. That's not a very good start; not even Firefox does that. Then I try to run it again, it worked, okay.

Google Chrome seems to be rather nice, and reminds me of Apple's Safari in appearance. It's fairly quick to start compared to Firefox/Iceweasel 3.0 and 3.5 (which I now got from the Debian testing distribution), and its simplicity feels generally comfortable. I could quickly find an extension for hiding ads and browse some web pages afterwards.

It's pretty nice for testing web pages and even has some neat web development features. However, I'm probably not using it for regular browsing since it lacks an off-line browsing mode option as far as I can see. I have very good reasons for requiring that feature that Opera, Firefox and even Internet Explorer provide. Also, it doesn't respect some fontconfig settings in Debian Squeeze for some reason.

Besides that, I got switched to Iceweasel 3.5 as a consequence of running aptitude full-upgrade blindly. It does appear to be more stable than Iceweasel and Mozilla Firefox 3.0, although I should wait some more time before assuming this to be true; the 3.0 bugs on amd64 Linux were pretty random and sometimes I could run the browser for days without crashing, and in other occasions it would crash after running for a few seconds, while trying to contact a web server for the first time in the session.

There are no visible UI changes in 3.5 as far as I'm concerned (besides the tab bar, and some menu icons which got some hue changes), and some glitches remain — for example, scrolling pages is less laggy now, but only if smooth scrolling is disabled; and the status bar still glitches for the current web site if one clicks on a single link a lot. However, I've heard rumors that many security vulnerabilities were fixed in this version, so I guess it's a reasonable trade-off; not that I'd visit suspicious websites, or worse, run a web browser on Windows.

So, for now, I still use Opera when I need reliability, and Firefox when I forget that I'm supposed to use Opera.