Also, Chrome has it’s own JavaScript engine which shares a number of performance differences between SquirrelFish et al., not the least of which is the multi-threading which is an important feature – certainly not “ahead of it’s time as a useful feature”. Powerful AJAX apps are already putting a strain on the older JS engines and noticeable performance enhancements can be achieved with multi-threading.

The lack of Mac support is dissapointing so far, but I don’t think it’s worth writing it off as useless. The competition between the new Firefox, new WebKit builds, and Chromium will be an exciting one.

Chrome is might be a better option for windows users, many of them enslaved to that lousy Internet explorer that MS pushes into the OS. Even on my PC, Firefox is the overwhelming safe choice.

It’s clearly not going to be the fastest web browser out there, at least in the first iteration. Javascript performance in almost every other browser is believed to be faster although everyone is so deep in betas at this point it’s not possible to be definitive either way. By the time it’s out for the Mac, the expected shakedown has Safari in the lead in both speed and market share, with Firefox sharing a close second with Opera.

The only thing Chrome has going for it is the “minimal” interface and the separate processes for tabs thingie. But while most people actually *complain* about Safari’s overly minimalist approach and Chrome goes much further than Safari ever will in that area. It’s also kind of ironic that before the new “minimalist” browser is even out, we already have talk about how many dubious clunky plug-ins it will support. The whole point of the Chrome UI is it’s minimalism, yet we will undoubtedly have tons of “themes” with puppy dogs and floaty clouds or babes in swimsuits plastered all over. There will be themes to make it look like Firefox and ones to make it look like Safari etc.

As for the separate memory spaces for web apps … great. But who uses web apps? A tiny, tiny fraction of users at this point, that’s who.

It is a brilliant move to treat browser tabs as separate processes, but lets get real here, it’s years ahead of it’s time in terms of a useful or needed feature. It’s also open source code. By the time the separate memory management part of Chrome actually becomes a real differentiating factor between browsers, Safari and Firefox will most likely do the same thing with their browsers.