Google has finally entered the Internet Browser market with the release of Google Chrome. Only time will tell to see if it can compete with Internet Explorer in terms of market share. For me, Firefox is the best browser out there but it still only has a 20% share of the market - even IE6 which is ancient in Internet years has a bigger share of the market than Firefox.

Will Google be able to leverage its search engine dominance to make Chrome bigger than IE?

I've downloaded and tested Chrome. My first thoughts were I like the clean look and feel. Secondly, it's clearly faster than both Firefox and IE, which is a major bonus. I also like the fact that each tab acts as its own 'sandbox', so that if a website causes the browser to crash, which happens a lot in IE and Firefox, it will only cause that tab to crash and not the entire browser.

So does that mean that I'll ditch Firefox and start using Chrome? Not likely yet. The biggest draw for me with Firefox is the plugins. There are currently no plugins or extensions for Chrome. That means no easy del.icio.us bookmarking, no stumbleupon toolbar, no Better Gmail, no GTDInbox for gmail, and no Firebug, to name but a few of the plugins I rely on. As Chrome is open-source I'm sure it will only be a matter of time before the plugins start appearing.

Also Chrome is only currently available for Windows, although a Mac version is in the works.

Hopefully by the time the Mac version is released they'll also have some decent plugins, in which case Google Chrome it will be.