There’s a lot of buzz about the new Google Chrome beta, which is now available on the Mac. I had an earlier version on my machine, but decided to upgrade to see if the beta was up to snuff.

Overall, I like the tab-oriented design, which requires some hackery to emulate in Safari. Lacking is 1Password support, which essentially rules it out as a primary browser for me. The main advantage, as cited by some of my Windows-using colleagues, is speed. While tests seem to show that Chrome is quite a bit faster than most other browsers in Windows, I can’t say the same of the Mac, at least my machine running the latest Safari on Snow Leopard.

Subjectively, I can’t see much of a speed difference between the two browsers – if anything, Safari seems a hair faster. This benchmark seems to substantiate these results. I’m getting a score of 527 in Safari, but only 489 in Chrome. In comparison, Firefox 3.5.5 gives me a pathetic 149.

Chrome also lacks one of my favorite features of Safari: speed dialing (which lets you load the bookmarks on your favorites bar by typing command-#, where # is any of the number keys). It’s always nice to have another browser in the mix, though – competition is good to keep things moving.