Google has stood idly by while the likes of Firefox and Safari have been chipping away at Internet Explorer's ubiquity for years. Browser wars have become fashionable again, and each of the IE/Safari/Firefox/Opera/whatever camps have been slaving away at trying to convince one another that their browser is superior.

No one was expecting Google to throw another contender into the mix, but that is exactly what they've done -- and by the looks of things, loyalties could be shifting sooner than you might think.

Dubbed "Chrome", the new browser is still in Beta (this is Google, after all), and is currently only available for Windows -- though OS X and Linux versions are in the works. Of interest are the technologies Google chose to employ in Chrome: WebKit (as in, Safari's rendering engine) for rendering, and a brand-new, Google-developed JavaScript interpreter named "V8".

My initial impressions of the browser are quite positive. The UI appears to be very clean and slick, start-up time is lightning-fast, resource use is minimal, and best of all, load/rendering performance is the best I've seen of any browser to date. Pages that normally take an ice age to load up due to massive amounts of JS (I'm looking at you, Digg) snap in with no hiccups.

The tabbed browsing implementation is also different from what we've seen in most browsers -- rather than housing everything in a single, monstrous process, Chrome uses a one-process-per-tab concept. What does this mean for the non-nerd? Stability, mostly.

I'm sure everyone has raged at their keyboard, nearest loved one, or a wall when a site in one of their tabs brings the whole browser (and all of your other awesome tabs you hadn't had a chance to read) down. With a one-process-per-tab implementation, if one of those tabs crashes, nothing else is affected.

Of course, other browsers have tried to get around this problem simply by letting you reload your last session the next time you launch the browser, but that's sort of a second-rate solution compared to simply not crashing in the first place.

Computer science nerds out there will tell me that the potential for resource use is higher since every process has to have a copy of certain things in its process memory, rather than sharing a copy, but that's irrelevant given that Chrome's total memory usage is already looking better than either IE's or Firefox's.

All in all, Google's first stab at these browser shenanigans is a solid one. I'm looking forward to the final product. If you have some free time, I highly recommend you try something new, and give it a whirl.