Chrome for Android now available

In something of a surprise move, Google have today released a beta of Chrome for Android onto the Market. Unfortunately for you non-Nexus/non-flashing folks, it’s only available for ICS. At least for now.

I’ve been having a play around with it and am really liking some of the new features.

Tab swiping

You can now swipe from the left or right edge of the screen to quickly swipe to the next/previous tab. Very useful for quickly switching and the animation is also nice.

Tab switching

There’s also a new tab switcher which displays your tabs stacked on top of each other with large previews of the tab contents. You can swipe up and down between tabs and also swipe left or right to dismiss unwanted tabs.

Chrome Sync

Perhaps the biggest new feature. Using your Google account you can keep Chrome synced between the desktop and your mobile. This obviously includes bookmarks sync but also lets you view tabs you have open on desktop Chrome (goodbye Chrome to Phone!).

Link Preview

Link preview is a new feature designed to more easily allow you to select a particular link when there are several clustered together. It does this by providing you with a zoomed in view of a subsection of the webpage.

Speed

Well this is Chrome! Everything feels very snappy and page loading is plenty quick enough. I haven’t run any benchmarks but it felt plenty fast to me.

Overall, a great initial release with plenty of promise for the future. How long before this replaces the standard Android browser? Let us know what you think of it in the comments below.

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