Google announced its new open-source web browser on Monday and yesterday released it for public beta. The blogosphere is now full of articles about this great new product from Google and many analysts are predicting that in two years' time the market share of Chrome will rival that of Mozilla's Firefox and pose a significant threat to Microsoft Internet Explorer.

We decided to give Google Chrome a try. Downloading and installing Chrome was quick and easy, although only the Windows version of the browser is currently available. We were impressed with the simple and clean user interface, and most of us thought that the internet pages were loading just a little bit quicker than on Firefox. There seemed to be no issues with the formatting of pages or any compatibility issues even with graphic- and content-intensive sites.

We next tried to launch Libra OnDemand application and had no issues whatsoever. The application performed very well, in fact the performance appeared to be even faster than on other browsers, with no impact on the user interface, even in more complex sections of the app. The Functions Map required a Flash plugin, which was installed automatically in a matter of seconds.

So, overall so far so good! Congrats Google!