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Ok as I write this we're about 12 hours or so into the release of Google Chrome. Now if you've been tucked away in your cave working your butt off then you might have missed all the talk about Chrome ... Google's new web browser ... and not even know that it was coming but now it's here you better start paying attention to it.

You can download a copy of it at google.com/chrome and I really would urge you to grab a copy. It may only be in beta ... just about everything that Google produces stays in beta for years ... but it's possibly going to change the way a lot of us work on the Net because it does some rather radical things.

Just the interface that users see when they fire up Chrome is different enough. It's a browser that comes with tabs but unlike Firefox or IE7 the tabs are right at the top of the screen so it looks a bit different.

The next thing that's missing is the header ... it's just not there although a little bit of the title tag does appear on the tab. Setting your home page is a bit of a chore ... but if you don't then the next time Chrome opens it shows screenshots of all the sites that the last person who used the browser looked at.

Even when you do set your home page I'm still trying to find how you actually get back there. Maybe the guys at Google don't go back to their home page very often but I like to head back there now and again to read my email.

The status bar isn't there either ... at least it's not visible all the time. It does actually appear when you place your cursor over a link and it then shows you where the link is pointing.

After 12 hours I'm still looking for the link to use that will allow me to preview a web page that I'm working on. There just seems to be no way you can get Chrome to open a web page that doesn't yet exist online. Does that worry me? Well yes it does because I like to work on new pages and new sites offline but evidently Chrome doesn't.

Another thing I don't like about this release is a link in the ‘current page' drop-down menu. It allows people to report bugs or broken websites and even lets you type in a description of what the problem is. It won't be long before some nasty people are going to be making all sorts of wild reports about sites that belong to competitors.

If you rely heavily on CSS for your websites then you may have a problem with Chrome because it doesn't render CSS very well at all. I've seen some examples of text and graphics that looked very bad in Chrome but displayed well in other browsers and when I have a moment I'll be doing some testing of my own to see just how bad it really is.

If you're a little security conscious you should perhaps be wary about using Chrome to access anything that requires a username and password. At least one person tested that on Chrome and found that whatever he had typed into Chrome was remembered and completed by the Google Toolbar when he went back to Firefox.

I should add here that Google Chrome comes without any obvious toolbar.

Of course many people have been looking to see if there are any security flaws in Chrome and it hasn't taken them long to find some. Chrome uses a version of WebKit as part of the software that runs the browser and Kaspersky Labs have found a major security flaw in the version of WebKit that Chrome uses. Apple also uses WebKit in Safari but the version Apple uses has already been patched ... two months ago.

Despite all those problems I have a sneaking suspicion that when you look at Chrome you're looking at the browser of the future. Google has the authority and the ability to convince people that Chrome is the only browser worth using so you better be ready for that time because, as I said earlier, it's going to change a the way a lot of us work on the Web.

One aspect of Chrome that I haven't mentioned till now is the address bar ... it's also the search box and it not only remembers ... and displays - or 'suggests' ... URLs from your history as you type something into that box but it does something else too.

Several people now think that what they're seeing as they enter words or URLs into the address bar/search box are suggestions from Google based on what is the number one listing in the search engine results pages for what Google thinks you're looking for.

If you're not worried by that one then you just haven't thought things through yet ... or you hold an iron grip on the top spot for all the search engine results pages that are important for your business.

Maybe I'm wrong on all counts ... maybe Chrome will turn into another Opera and be used by so few people that it's basically not worth worrying about ... but I'm certainly not prepared to bet my first born on it.