Google Chrome is available for download. I’ve done it in fact; very smooth install. It looks like the company is serious about getting this widely deployed quickly, despite its beta status – there’s a download link on the Google home page – must be important to break the 28 words rule.

Chrome shows your “most visited” sites as a kind of home page. I was amused to see that Microsoft.com shows up here as blank:

No doubt there is a good technical reason. People used to say “DOS Ain’t Done until Lotus won’t run”; and that was not true either.

Update: Honesty compels me to admit that the Microsoft snapshot eventually filled in. Still, it is not much better:

The problem is that the central Silverlight panel is failing to load; the main site looks like this in Chrome as well. OK, so Silverlight doesn’t support Chrome. But Microsoft no doubt has something better than a blank panel for incompatible browsers. Was it warned in advance about the advent of Chrome? Was anyone? I know this is WebKit and that what works in Safari should work here; but we all know that browser compatibility is complex. Still, it is entertaining.

Further update: It looks the same in Safari on Windows! I should explain that there is some more stuff to the right and below the empty panel; but the empty sky background occupies the main part of the page.

To get the full picture, I visited the page with FireFox on Linux:

This looks better, but it’s a tease. It has a link to download Silverlight; if you follow it, it eventually reveals that your browser or operating system is unsupported. Sloppy Microsoft; Google exonerated.

More on Chrome soon, no doubt.