Google's Chrome is an impressive browser with a simple and clean user interface. But, while it handles popular websites with no difficulty, our tests suggest that web-based business applications may be a different matter.

Now available for download, Chrome runs on Windows XP and Windows Vista, but there is little to give away it is a beta release.

The application downloads and installs with a minimum of fuss. It has a polished look and seemed perfectly stable in our tests.

We tried out Chrome on a variety of commonly accessed websites, such as BBC News, and found it loaded pages promptly, with no surprises such as odd fonts or elements rendered out of place.

The first site we visited - vnunet.com - caused Chrome to prompt us to download a Flash plug-in, which the browser fetched and installed in seconds. However, sites with Java content proved more problematic.

Trawling through the help files, we found that Chrome works only with Java SE version 6 update 10, which is still currently in beta itself. This installed with no difficulty on our test system once we located it on Sun's download site.

Chrome passes the Acid2 browser test for standards compliance, and also achieves a higher score (76 out of 100) on the more demanding Acid3 test than either Firefox 3 or IE7 when we tried this.

We encountered some difficulties with enterprise applications. The web-based content management system we use to update vnunet.com simply stated that Chrome was an unsupported browser and would not proceed any further.

Web access to our Lotus Domino-based corporate email also did not function correctly. This suggests that business users may be best advised to stick with Internet Explorer or Firefox for now.

Google's own applications, such as Google Mail and Google Docs, displayed with no problems, as you might expect.

Most users will find Google Chrome a refreshing change from other browsers, as it has an uncluttered user interface that keeps the number of controls to a minimum.

We found it immediately obvious how everything works, while the same could not be said of Microsoft's IE7 when we first encountered it.

As with other modern browsers, Chrome supports tabs, and the company claims that each tab is an isolated 'sandbox' to prevent a page in one tab from crashing another.

We were unable to verify this, but it should mean that users will not lose any data if they are typing an email in one tab when another one fails, for example.

One neat feature is that when you open a new tab, it displays thumbnails of sites you have previously visited enabling you to select one at a glance.

Another feature that users may appreciate is incognito browsing. A similar concept to the InPrivate mode of Microsoft's IE8 beta, this opens a new browser window in which you can surf without leaving any trace in the history or cookies.

Our early verdict is that Google Chrome is easy to use and a viable alternative to other browsers for consumers.

For businesses users, however, compatibility issues with web-based applications is likely to count against it.