After a relatively short "announce to launch" window, Google launched its new, open source web browser, Google Chrome. It was announced over the weekend, and a comic book-style introduction was published yesterday. Unfortunately, it’s only available for Windows just yet – us mac users will have to either wait a bit for Google Chrome for OS X, or give it the ole Boot Camp try and take the dive to load up windows.

Although real world performance and deployment is the ultimate test, I think Google’s idea of making each tab of the browser into is separate, isolated process is a good one. This should allow for more power to be devoted to more robust web apps, isolate bad code and bad webpages, and overall provide a more customized and customizable operating environment for each individual website – I know that during my day, I am often times simultaneously working with sites that use flash, java, ajax, silverlight, embedded media, active x, etc etc etc. Being able to keep each of these isolated to just the page where it’s needed seems like it would be a huge performance and stability boost. Additionally, I’m excited to hear that Google Chrome is built from the ground up to be much better at managing memory. Although Firefox, my current browser of choice, is super fast and relatively stable, after using it continuously for an entire day, it tends to start eating up massive amounts of memory. The precise memory management in Google Chrome will hopefully work well.

That’s all for now – tonight I’ll hopefully find some time to install it in Windows XP pro in bootcamp on my MBP, and give at a real test run.

Sites I plan to test with Google Chrome, for performance and stability –

Gmail.com – web app – made by Google, so it should run perfectly.

Jeffzilla.com – obviously

Meebo.com – another great web app

Hulu.com – streaming video

WordPress admin – non-Google web app which uses the Google Gears Framework

Potatoland.com – hosts some neat java applets, which create trippy graphics – visually intensive java applet processing

Lively.com – Google’s virtual world, fairly graphics intensive

Flickr.com Organizr – again, intense flash/java web app

Finally, elsewhere in the blogosphere… TechCrunch has some massive video action happening – but luckily if you’re using Chrome, it should be able to load up all those rich media YouTube flash windows with no problem!

Kara Swisher discusses the early comic book leak, and the ongoing re-ignition of the browser war.

Regarding process isolation, check this overview video on the Chrome Task Manager…