Google entered the browser wars with Google Chrome for Windows just under a year ago and according to a study by Net Applications, it's already become the fourth biggest browser out there with almost 2% of the market.

Mac fans can now try Google Chrome for themselves, although should note that this is strictly a developer release meaning some features (such as bookmarking and the Flash player) are not working yet. It's also prone to bugs and instability but it's enough to give you a good idea as to what the finished product will look and feel like. Note that at the moment, it only works on Intel Macs.

The first thing I noticed about Google Chrome is that it's unbelievably lightweight. While Firefox was consuming anything from 20-30% of my Mac's CPU, Chrome barely registered on the scale, occasionally touching 1%. For anyone plagued with Firefox memory leaks and crashes, this alone is surely going to be a compelling reason to give Chrome a go. As you'd expect, Google Chrome also features tabbed browsing, which, visually, I find a little easier than Firefox, which tends to cram them together somewhat.

Google Chrome is also extremely quick. Surfing the Softonic site, page-loads took less then a second and all images were loaded very quickly. YouTube in particular loaded with lightening speed but unfortunately, because the Flash player is disabled in this developer release, it wasn't possible to test watching videos. However, sometimes, it simply produced nothing when trying to find the YouTube homepage and maybe this is one of the bugs Google are working on. Overall however, the handling of sites using JavaScript in particular was mightily impressive.

If only there were more extensions for Google Chrome, I'd seriously consider converting when the final build is released. Based on the early evidence in this release though, Safari and Firefox may well have a real fight on their hands.