Just yesterday, Google released the beta build of Chrome for Mac. It however isn’t an official launch as Google would want it to be, claiming it’s merely a developer release. They’ve advised non-developers NOT to download the beta, as it might be disappointing.

How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things, you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.

We nerds hardly pay attention to such warnings, and installed the browser anyway. Initial impressions? It’s fast. Smoking fast. It’s so fast, it makes fast browsers feel… not fast. The speed I’m talking about isn’t about javascript or other benchmarks, but of the app itself. It launches within a second (half-bounce) and is good to go the moment the window shows up. Creating new tabs, switching between them, and everything else seems really spiffy.

User interface wise it’s got a subjectively better tab implementation than our dear friend Safari 4. It’s weird, that after all these months of using Safari’s tabs, I find everything else weird and broken. For instance, if I want to drag the browser window I have to carefully select tiny window area. Also, I did notice some jerkyness when moving tabs and resizing windows, as well as not being able to drag links here and there, but we all know it comes with the big BETA banner. As for stability, I’ve been using the browser all morning, and it hasn’t crashed on me so I’ll gladly give it the ‘stable’ label.

Should you download it? If you’ve been waiting for Chrome for Mac all  along, you probably already have. If you’re looking to switch from Safari, I’d suggest you just wait a while, as Chrome is still not ready. The choice of course, is entirely yours.