For a while there, I thought Google had just abandoned Chrome for Mac completely. It seems like it’s been forever since we’ve heard even official whispers about it, but today they finally released it to the public, albeit in beta. I wasn’t a big fan of Chrome for Windows, in all its overly-blue glory; sure it was fast, but I wasn’t a fan of the top tabs, and the interface and layout were just not sleek or aesthetically pleasing. I still had hope for the Mac version, however, because those are problems that plague most if not all Windows applications.

It seems I was right in that regard, as Chrome for Mac beta is much more streamlined and easy on the eyes than its Windows counterpart, and has many more little nifty features that make using Chrome a pleasure.

First of all, I wasn’t a fan of how chunky the top utilities bar (bookmarks bar, address bar, tab bar) was, but on this Mac version it uses the exact same amount of screen real estate as Safari does for me. Not to mention you can “theme” Chrome beta for Mac, which you probably can for Windows at this point also, and I know you can with Firefox, and the place you’ll most often notice this is the “utilities” bar at the top with the navigation buttons and bookmarks, as you can see in the screenshot below, where I have the Cork Board theme applied.

The address bar acts as a search bar as well, with Google as the default search engine, although you can customize it to be whichever you’d like. You can also set up keywords for searching other engines, for example, you can set it up to search bing by typing “bing” and then pressing

tab while in the address bar, after which you can enter your query.

The bookmarks bar is basically the same as Safari’s, except with one fault: when you click a bookmark folder, it brings up a menu of the contents, but when you click the folder again it just brings the menu up again, rather than closing the menu like in Safari, which is pretty annoying. Although Google did add a nice hover-over effect to the bookmarks.

Having the tabs on top was one thing I originally disliked about Chrome. When Safari 4 beta had tabs on top, I wasn’t happy about it, but after using it for a bit I got used to it, and eventually liked having the extra space that it saved. So then I was unhappy when Safari 4 final had bottom tabs again, but I adapted. Well, Chrome for Mac still has top tabs, and at this point I do not care where the tabs are located. Plus points for the neat open and close tab animation, though. One thing I appreciate that Google included is a hotkey to scroll through browser tabs, but it comes with a caveat. I’m used to glims for Safari, which has tab scrolling with the comma and period keys, which I think is absolutely perfect. In Chrome, the hotkey for tab scrolling is cmd+opt+left/right, which is much more thorough than comma or period. So kudos for including it, but let me customize it plz.

For those of us that are fans of Safari’s Top Sites or Opera’s Speed Dial, Chrome has their ‘new tab’ page, which is functionally approximately the same, with minor differences. First of all, the background depends on what theme you’re using, it’s not always black like in Safari, a nice little feature. You also have two ways to view them: Thumbnail or List view. Another caveat about Google’s version is that as far as I can tell, you can’t customize the amount of sites included in it, you just have 8. Other than that, I think it works pretty well; you can pin sites and remove them just like in Safari.

There are a bunch of little features in Chrome beta for Mac that make it great to use. One of my favorites is that when you mouse-over a link, in the bottom left corner of the screen it’ll display the entire link address, which is super convenient. Even more convenient, is that if you’re mousing over an address in the bottom left corner of the page, it’ll jump right quick over to the bottom right side of the screen. Obviously the themes add a cool aspect to the browser and are super easy to download and implement, so those are always worth playing around with. The downloads window is a full screen window, but when you download a file it brings up a horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen displaying what you’re downloading as well as a completion bar in the form of a circle around the file. The bar hides itself when the download finishes, which is a great idea. The history page is super clean and efficient, although it doesn’t filter results as you type like in Safari, which is unfortunate. Another cool feature is that you can set it to open multiple websites upon starting up the app.

There are a few things that I didn’t really like about it. As I mentioned earlier, the bookmarks folder thing irks me. I also don’t really like how you can’t cycle through your bookmarks with cmd+1, cmd+2, etc. Also, when you first start using it, and for a while after, you’ll be prompted to allow or deny google access to your keychain content on various sites for various reasons. But these are relatively minor gripes. Chrome beta for Mac starts up super quick, and loads pages even faster. Honestly, this is the first browser that I’ve used that is seriously tempting me away from Safari. It’s gonna be a hard decision. All in all, this browser is packing some serious speed, features, and finesse. Give it a try.