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It was only after I did the research when I realized that a lot of hard work really went into the development of Google Chrome for Mac OS X. In fact, it literally took over one year to release into beta. In September of 2008, software engineer, Mike Pinkerton, was assigned to help with the Chromium Project and Google Chrome.

Prior, he had accepted a position at Google back in September of 2005 to do work for their Firefox team, and four months later moved to Google’s Mac Client Team. Pinkerton has many years of experience in the web browser industry starting in 1997 with Netscape Communications. But interestingly enough, it was during that time when Mike Pinkerton and his partner began working on the Camino web browser.

Camino is a Mozilla based browser developed specifically for Mac computers. Camino is a very fine tuned web browser. In fact, just last month, Camino 2.0 was officially released. Now the ironic part to all this is the fact that while Mike Pinkerton was developing Camino, he also was developing Google Chrome at the same time. Active users have been eagerly waiting over a year for the release of Google Chrome for Mac and the update on Camino, and interestingly enough, both came within a month from each other.

The great news is that Google Chrome is finally here for Mac and also a great alternative to FireFox is available as well. I’ll provide a review on Camino in the near future. In the mean time, I’d like to dig into Chrome for Mac and explain some of the features.

To begin with, Pinkerton explained that it was important to make sure that the Mac version of Chrome was fast, stable, and secure, just like the Windows version. He stated that they completely rebuilt Chrome for Mac from the bottom up and made many fo the useful Mac OS X features apart of the Google Chrome experience.

Some of these native features include integrating the Mac OS Spell Checker. Another is Keychain. They wanted to make it so that passwords created by users could be stored and accessed centrally even when created by other web browsers. Additional features unique to Mac include sandboxing support which helps make Chrome even more secure.

To learn more about the key features of Google Chrome and more details about Google Chrome for Mac, I recommend tuning into Mike Pinkerton’s presentation video below:

One of the key features that I personally enjoy the most is the Omnibox. Becuase of that, I want to also include a second video that explains more about it and how it can benefit you:

All in all, I am very glad to see Google Chrome finally available for Mac. Keep in mind, this is a beta release and there’s going to be a lot more work done before it’s final. Also, beta for Mac is different than beta for PC. For instance, Google Chrome for Mac doesn’t support extensions yet which make it difficult to customize, although as of writing this, TechCrunch has some updates about that. You can check out the post on Google Mac Blog and the post on Google Chrome Blog to learn more. If you want to learn more about Mike Pinkerton, you should check out his blog and follow him on Twitter.  Over the next few weeks I am going to use both Chrome and Camino and write a future article depicting their differences.

When Google Chrome web browser was first introduced, instantly I was hooked. The browser performed beautifully, it was super fast, and amazingly stable. Seriously, it never crashed. But keep in mind, the browser wasn’t perfect. Simple things bothered me such as the lack of add on features, inability to auto discover RSS feeds, and huge complications with setting Chrome as the default web browser. these imperfections, while they might seems severe, were nothing compared to dealing with Internet Explorer crashing, and FireFox performing slow. Again, using Chrome is literally like riding on a greased lightning bolt. It’s fast, super fast.

Google Chrome has other important features that I enjoy, such as being able to use the address bar as a Google search bar:

With all that goodness, unfortunately, my use for Google Chrome came to a sudden end when I purchased my first MacBook computer. Talk about bitter sweet feelings. First off, your next computer purchase totally needs to be a Mac. I personally recommend it. I will never use a Windows based computer again. Mac computers are so well built, I had to take a few minutes to figure out how to turn my MacBook off. I literally had my MacBook running for two months before I finally needed to restart it, and I simply didn’t know how to do it.

That said, here’s the conflict. In my opinion, Google Chrome is by far the best web browser available. It blows Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari out of the water. The interface is very clean, simple, and extremely condusive towards a healthy browsing experience. But since I purchased my MacBook, the problem is that Google Chrome hasn’t been available for Mac. The great news is that this has all changed. Google Chrome for Mac is finally available via their early access release channel.

Installing Google Chrome on your Mac computer is very easy. It took me less than a minute. Simply visit the early access release channel. Click on the Mac Tab and proceed to download the Dev Channel: GoogleChrome.dmg. After the file has been downloaded, extract it and then drag the Chrome appliction into your Application folder:

Once Chrome has been installed, you can access it by opening up Finder and navigating to your Applications Folder.

For convenience, you may want to drag the Chrome icon into your Dock. I hope that you’re as happy as I am being able to use Google Chrome again. Now Mac users have the best of both worlds. we can all use the best web browser on the best computer available.