One week ago I had 2 mbps and IE 7.0 and now on I have 100 Mbps and google chrome. That means now I am flying….

About noon Pacific, the download site for Google’s new open-source browser, Chrome, will go live. In a press conference held today at the Google headquarters, some of the Chrome team went through what makes Chrome new and different. While we’ll have a hand-on as soon as possible, here’s a quick rundown of what makes Chrome special.

Update 12:11 PM PDT: The installer is about 7 Mbytes, according to Google.

Tabs:: First and foremost, the team said that they wanted to make tabs special. Firefox and Opera introduced this concept to the world, and they’re now part of everyday browsing life. In Chrome, tabs are objects; they can be dragged and reorganized, split off into separate windows, and then rejoined. Even better, if one tab crashes, the other don’t. Chrome is a multiprocess rendering engine, so if one tab dies, the others don’t. And the browser doesn’t die, either. It’s even better with a dual-core CPU.

Security: And it has security implications, too: normally processes on the desktop can mess with your files. But to render Web pages, you don’t need those processes. Google calls this technology the “Sandbox”. Google also will make the browser’s “task manager” transparent to the user, so you can see if a Flash process, for example, is monopolizing your browser. And if a tab dies, it can be restored.

The “Omnibox”: A browser without a Google search box? Yes. Like the Mozilla “Awesomebar,” the address box can be used as the search box, too. But that’s not all. Chrome includes a feature that “knows” what you’re looking for: type “a”, for example, and if you’re a frequent Amazon user, the bar will auto-suggest “amazon.com” — a feature that has been in the Google search box for some time. But if you use Amazon’s own on-page search engine, for example, Chrome can sniff that too, and will offer you the option to use that directly in future searches. But, if you already have a preference to use IE or Yahoo’s search, Chrome will recognize that and build that in. There are no intrinsic ties to Google services, according to Google executives — probably a dodge against an antitrust investigation.

Tabs as apps: For some windows, such as Gmail, users don’t often move away from the page. In this case, there’s a special option to “save” the application as a desktop shortcut. When it’s opened, the browser will eliminate the search/address box.

“Incognito window”: Want to search for a new job? A racy novel? An “incognito window” not only offers the same safety features as the other tabs, but it also prevents any sort of cookies or Web history from being stored on the browser. Internet Explorer 8 also offers a similar technology.

Transparent downloads: This looks like a bit like a Mozilla plugin called Download Statusbar. Downloading a file prompts a little arrow pointing down to a notification bar that is created at the bottom of the screen, where you can select how to handle the file: save it, run it, etc.

Performance: Google executives showed off a test that rendered many typical We pages about three times faster than Internet Explorer. But tests will have to confirm this. Google’s Chrome uses the Webkit rendering engine used in Safari, and a custom “V8″ Javascript rendering engine.