Although it only became available a few hours ago, Google's new web browser which goes under the name of Chrome has already become a huge talking point even outside of the tech community with it getting coverage in the press all over the world.

Time will tell how successful Google Chrome will be, but our first impression of it is very favourable and it seems to work quite well with most websites, although some seem to be rendered slightly wrong. However, it is still in beta and we're sure Google will iron out these problems as they get reports of them sent in from users all over the world.

It seems to be a very fast browser and although we've only used it for a few hours, our first impression is very favourable. The new tab system works well and it's no stranger to have the tabs on top than it is to have them below the address bar. So far (fingers crossed) we haven't seen a single crash, unlike the new Internet Explorer 8 beta which sometimes even crashes before it has started properly.

The task manager is also a neat feature and you can see exactly how much memory each web page uses and the same goes for plug-ins. There's also an advanced statistics page for those that are interested in the ins and outs of it all and you can see at what speed you're downloading the specific page you're trying to access in the task manager.

We also have a feeling that Chrome will become very popular with web developers as you can see a lot more of the page code than you can with other browsers when you access the page properties. This should be a good way of finding bugs and problems on a visual level.

There's still a few niggles, like the lack of a dedicated bookmarks button, as you have to open a new Window if you don't want the bookmarks bar to take up space, which is a little bit frustrating. It also took us some time to set up the correct version of Google that we wanted to use for our searching, as it defaulted to the most local server, which isn't useful in this case.

You can download and try it by yourself here