And hey, it's free.

What's under the hood? WebKit, the same open-source rendering engine used by Apple Inc.'s Safari, also powers Chrome. And Google execs also credited Mozilla's Firefox with providing some unspecified "components" inside Chrome.

Oddly enough, or perhaps not odd at all, Apple was the only one of the four major browser makers -- the others are Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera -- that didn't bother responding to requests for comment today on Chrome's introduction. Nor did the various WebKit blogs, including David Hyatt's "Surfin' Safari," bother to post entries about Chrome and its use of the engine.

How fast is Chrome? The jury's still out. Some testers who have run it through JavaScript benchmarks have reported out-of-this-world results. But others, including Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal -- as far as we know, the only reviewer who got an early look at Chrome -- dinged it for rendering slower than, say, Firefox on Windows.

That's our off-the-cuff impression, too. Trying it out in Windows XP, Chrome is no speed demon here, either.

What about its memory footprint? Is it as big a pig as IE8 Beta 2? Bigger, according to Craig Barth of Devil Mountain Software Inc., who just ran Chrome through the same performance test that he used Monday to name IE8 as "epically porcine."

"What we found was shocking," Barth said. "We discovered that it is Google Chrome, not Internet Explorer 8, that is the true memory consumption leader."

By his numbers, Chrome came very close to matching IE8 Beta 2 on peak memory use (324MB for Chrome, 332MB for IE8), but used more memory on average (267MB for Chrome versus 211MB for IE8).

Barth attributed the heftier memory appetite of Chrome to its multi-process tabbing model, where each tab is actually a separate iteration of the browser. "It's use of that model, which, according to Google, helps isolate failures and protect complex Web applications, [that] means that it will always use more memory than Firefox, IE 7 and similar, single-process browsers," he said.

We haven't had a chance to catch up yet with Barth for a conversation to drill into his data, but we plan to Wednesday.

Where do I go for Chrome support? Google's set up a Chrome Help Center here, but there's no support desk to phone or e-mail.

Instead, Chrome's support leans, like most of Google, toward self-help. The Center sports some online documentation, but for real problems, you should steer straight to the user-to-user forum where you can ask others questions and hope someone comes up with an answer.