On the plus side, another browser is a good thing. It gives people another choice other than the dreadful Internet Explorers. Yes, and I mean IE7, too. Chrome uses the Webkit rendering engine, so there shouldn’t be any real surprises in rendering.

Let’s hope this comes out of beta soon, along with IE8 and we can start using some CSS3. How I long for that day.

Trouble is, with all those extensions loaded onto it, it becomes one heavy browser. That means that when I’m off duty and just surfing around, I notice things like the pause between clicking the “new tab” icon and being able to type anything in the address bat of the new tab that just opened.

Enter Opera, a fast, light browser that until now had been on my machine just for testing. It’s so quick, sometimes I’ve finished reading a page before I’ve even clicked the link to visit it. And the back button is the fastest I’ve ever seen. Javascript-wise, it’s very quick too, just a tad behind Safari in my experience. Most sites work fine with it, but sometimes I find I have to fire up Safari instead, although that’s surprisingly rare considering its market share and my expectations.