I’ve been looking for a new browser recently, mostly because nothing’s really cutting it. I like the gesture support for my Macbook in Firefox 3.5, but it’s a crazy buggy release, the worst I’ve had from Mozilla, and its been driving me crazy. The spinning-lollipop-of-death when I’m browsing through Google Reader is enough to make me wish I had more hair so I could pull it out. Safari’s nice, but it’s missing my gestures and feels sluggish at times. I’m not an Opera guy, so just don’t ask. There is an up and comer that I’ve got my eye on, though, and I’m anxiously awaiting a stable build.

I’m talking about Chrome for OS X, which is known in development right now as Chromium. I’ve been playing around with a few of the most recent builds and I have to say, the browser just keeps getting better. They still haven’t implemented most of the gestures I love (seriously, rotating two fingers to flip through tabs is wonderful), but it seems like new features are making the pre-alpha build almost every day, which can only mean good things for the future.

As a recent article on CNet points out, Chromium is also kicking some Apple ass in the speed department. Chromium comes in a solid 34% faster than Safari, which used to be king on almost any OS X machine.

It’s strange, I never really used to place much importance on my browser, but its become almost as important as the operating system. I spend so much of my time within a browser’s confines that it makes me curious just what Chrome OS is going to do for mobile computing. I love the sleek simplicity of Chrome (I also own a PC) which is only enhanced by the pure speed of the whole thing. Once it gets going on my Mac, I just might be in love.

For those of you looking to make a change, the guys at TechCrunch have put together a little program with an Automator script that will automatically check to see that you have the latest version of Chromium installed.