After 3 days of use on 4 dif­fer­ent com­put­ers and 2 oper­at­ing sys­tems, I can safely attest that Google Chrome is frickin sweet. Really, it’s been fun to be excited about a browser again. Fire­fox is near and dear for sure, but it had been a while since that love was new, and Chrome bur­nished the fad­ing flame. If you haven’t read the intro­duc­tory comic, which is com­plete with nerd-joke easter eggs (Tufte! 10^100!), I sug­gest you do. But if not, I came up with a way to describe the dif­fer­ence that Google Chrome makes.

Ok so let’s imag­ine your com­puter is a restau­rant. This gets bet­ter, I promise.

Any restau­rant has a kitchen. The kitchen is your CPU.

Restau­rants have patrons, too. And they all­lll want some­thing from the kitchen, that’s why they’re there.

But how do you get the instruc­tions to the kitchen and the food to the patrons?

Wait­ers.

Wait. What?

Wait­ers! And this is a fancy restau­rant, every table has its own waiter. The wait­ers are your processes, that list of things that comes up when Out­look crashes and you CTRL+ALT+DEL. And wait­ers are con­stantly are talk­ing to the patrons and the kitchen. And a good waiter ends up talk­ing more often to each side than a bad waiter.

So, exactly where does this get interesting?

First, the com­pe­ti­tion. Browsers like Inter­net Explorer and Fire­fox use more and more of your computer’s resources as web­sites get more com­pli­cated and do more; think of all of that Web 2.0 con­tent out there that we love. Now think of your fam­ily reunion.

A browser in this tory is really a big table of all your rel­a­tives. Lots of hun­gry peo­ple, and they all clamor for food, now. Oy. And of course you all sit at the same table. But the prob­lem is, a table only has one waiter. So for every­one to eat quickly, the waiter has to be really really good, and every­body has to order at the same time for every­one to get fed expe­di­ently. If your fat Uncle Ricky takes a while to fig­ure out whether to order the ranch or the bacon vinai­grette on his side salad, you know it’s going to take longer for the waiter to get around to you, and longer for every­one to eat. So every­thing on both sides has to work just right, or the ser­vice is bad. So maybe you don’t come back to this restaurant.

Google Chrome avoids this problem.

Chrome takes your big fam­ily the next time they go out and says, uh-uh, you can’t sit together this time, because any­way, not all of you need to sit together. You’re not all REALLY friends, you just share some DNA. You peo­ple should sit apart, at lots of dif­fer­ent tables, with… lots of dif­fer­ent wait­ers. Besides, your fat Uncle Ricky, he’s only a half Uncle because of your Grandad’s sec­ond mar­riage, so you don’t need to sit with him. You don’t need to wait for him to fig­ure out his dress­ing choice. It won’t make your food late. You’re cool. You’re food arrived right when you expected it, and you really feel like you had the ben­e­fit of hav­ing one waiter to your­self. Much bet­ter than that last place you went to, right?

So that’s the beauty of Google Chrome. Down­load a beta of the future and take it for a spin. There are some kinks, but it’s an extremely usable beta. Besides, Gmail is still in beta after 3+ years, so no rea­son to wait.