Google Chrome, for all its innovations, is just a browser. It does a few things differently and some might find that, once they get used to it, it helps them get the job done faster or easier than Firefox or other browsers but don’t expect anything revolutionary.

Don’t be fooled by the beta label, Google Chrome is more than suited for serious work. Google has a knack for keeping products in beta for extended periods of time, Gmail was in beta for five years, so the concept means something a bit different for Google developers than for the rest of the world. That being said, it’s still not on par with Firefox and there are a couple of glitches and annoying minor flaws. They’re far from a deal breaker but after you’ve spent enough time using Google Chrome it’s hard not to notice them.

This issue is a bit tricky. Google Chrome is not, in fact, open source by itself. It’s free and available to anyone but it comes with a pretty clear license agreement, well, as clear as license agreements can get anyway, that specifically forbids people from trying to reverse-engineer the code in order to copy, modify or distribute it.

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However, it is very closely based on the Chromium open-source project, where the active development for Google Chrome is being done. For all intents and purposes, Chromium is Google Chrome without the branding and with more experimental code. Any Free GNU/Linux distribution that would want to bundle Chrome would choose Chromium but there’s little reason besides ‘principles’ to do so for the average user.

Google Chrome is one of those things that you either love or hate. In fact, it will probably be a mixture of the two but one thing’s for sure: there’s little about it that you’d call boring or ignorable. There’s plenty to like about Google Chrome and it gets a lot of things right, which is why plenty of other browser makers are taking more than a few cues from Google’s browser. Chrome has been out for a year and a half on Windows and more than half a year on Linux. Google has been pushing betas for Linux since December but even so, at this point, Chrome has a well-rounded set of features and stability isn’t an issue.

However, if you’re looking for a Firefox replacement, Google Chrome isn’t it. For one thing, there are still some features missing. It’s nothing crucial but some of the omissions are by choice so they’re not going to change anytime soon. Secondly, it does quite a few things differently from Firefox, some for the better, some for the worse, but in most cases it’s up to the individual user to judge. But this, in fact, it’s how it should be. Google Chrome shouldn’t be just another Firefox, even a better one. Real choice is when people can have a great browser that caters to their own needs rather than trying to satisfy everyone and that’s the one thing that Google Chrome does provide, a real choice, a viable web-browser alternative to the established ones.