Google finally released the much-an­tic­i­pat­ed Chrome preview for Mac and Linux yesterday. I’ve tried it on my OS 10.5 MacBook and my Ubuntu Jaunty Netbook Remix netbook.

Chrome works fairly well, so far. It seems slow at resolving hostnames, but otherwise downloads pages quickly. Rendering speed is good. Gmail comes up in an amazingly short time, as in Windows Chrome. It uses less CPU than Safari or Camino.

Favicons are not showing up in tabs on Mac. Fonts are not an­tialiased on Linux.

As a user, I’m happy to see that there is real com­pe­ti­tion between the browsers after the stagnation in the first half of this decade, when IE6 ruled. As a web developer, it’s a pain to have so many browsers to test.