It's shiny. It's fast. It's stable. The UI is nice and unobtrusive. It works with almost everything I've tried, with the exception of Pogo (because their java check is failing). I'm hoping Pogo fixes their check soon, because it's the one site that would most benefit from the separate processes per tab. Java does work, as long as you get the latest (RC 10). No one seems to mention it, but having separate processes makes it screamingly fast on a multi-processor box.

I know it's probably more a WebKit thing then Chrome, but the resizable text boxes are entirely for the win. I hate websites where they give you two lines of text to enter a comment, and now I can just make the box bigger!

I drag tabs a lot between windows, but today sgillbee mentioned at lunch that you can also take a window, add a tab to it, and dock it in a another windows. This make Mvelopes a lot less annoying, because I can tab it and not have it as it's own window all the time.

I like the one-box control. It makes sense - I put what I want in the box, whether it's a search string or a direct URL. And it's tidying multi-line URLs - I copied a URL from an email that had split it between two lines, and the box was smart enough to join it.

There are some downsides. I wanted the bookmarks to at least have the option of integrating with Google Bookmarks, and that's just not available yet. Without that, it's going to be hard to keep my bookmarks synced between the 5 machines I keep synced with Google Bookmarks.

There's no Mac or Linux version yet. Of course, my server has lynx, which should be good enough for anyone!

RSS feeds don't seem to be handled right. I just get the raw RSS, not a "Add to Google Reader..."-type interface. I'm really surprised so many of the Google services aren't integrated, honestly.

The other downside is that I'm a heavy Greasemonkey user. Now I've got to have IE for the 3 websites in the world which don't run on anything but IE (and everyone seems to have at least one of them in their bookmarks!), and Firefox for GreaseMonkey, and now Chrome. Without an extension model in Chrome, GreaseMonkey isn't going to be available anytime soon, which is a shame, because the improved JS engine would really make it scream.

It feels like a Google product - free, open source, lots of nice developer features (right-click and "inspect element" is going to make my web coding so much easier to debug!), but still missing a few things. Still, it's going to become my default browser on the PC for now.

Tags: chrome, geeky
Current Mood: impressed