Make no bones about it, Chrome is meant to enable a platform that will directly compete with with Flash - specifically, note the new "V8" javascript engine, which compiles javascript to native code and has much improved garbage collection.  Google explicitly states that this is a move to make javascript faster and more robust, so that more complex application can be built using it.

Now, if somebody could come up with a programming model/environment for HTML/DOM/Javascript that didn't suck ass.

I'm not impressed either.  The press and the bloggers are uncritically repeating the "8-10x faster" claims from Google's press release, but the benchmarks don't bear it out.  On general purpose benchmarks like SunSpider Chrome is fast, but not crazy fast.  It's about on par with Firefox 3.1 on my computer.  In a number of DOM benchmarks it actually loses to Firefox 3.1 and Safari 4.  The only benchmark that supports the 10x claim is one Google themselves wrote, which consists almost entirely of recursion.  It's not a realistic picture of browser performance.

I foresee a real problem for Chrome because it looks like they spent all their effort on JavaScript execution speed and process separation, but didn't address WebKits serious memory usage problems.  Firefox has tackled both size and speed problems in 3 and 3.1 respectively.  Firefox 3's memory usage tends to be constant over time while Chrome's memory use increases quite linearly if you leave it running.  They're going to have to address WebKit's memory management before it will be a serious application platform.

That said, the KHTML people should be proud that they've now spawned three completely respectable browsers: Konqueror, Safari, and Chrome.  Despite the decade of development behind Mozilla, only Mozilla's own projects (Firefox, Thunderbird, and Camino) use their engine.  The third-party people like Songbird don't have any traction.

Microsoft, on the other hand, should hang their heads in shame.  Internet Explorer 8 is about 5 times slower than any of Chrome, Firefox 3.1, or Safari 4.  And Internet Explorer 7 is twelve times slower than its contemporaries Firefox 3 and Safari 3.  Shameful.

Regarding javascript, I read somewhere (can't recall where at the moment) that they're working on optimizing the scripting performance, but that the beta isn't there yet.

[Chrome] saves copies of the text of every page you visit [and allows you to search it]

Opera does this as well, without keeping https stuff around.

In the location bar, type "news.yahoo.com" (or use autocompletion if that's too many characters for you), then hit tab.  You get the ability to directly query news.yahoo.com for an article.

Opera does this better, although it requires some manual setup: Right-click into a text-box, select "Create Search", give it a short cut (say "ny" for your "news.yahoo.com" example) and of you go.

Ctrl-t opens a new tab with an empty location bar, cursor in the bar, type "ny democratic convention" and hit enter.

I've set up:
-gs  -- google scholar
-gm  -- google maps
-th/tl  -- trip planner from home / our lab
-d  -- my favourite dictionary (dict.leo.com)
-r  -- recipes (cooking for engineers :-p)

Ok, enough Opera propaganda for now.

Cheers,
Michael

PS I've recently discovered that it actually does have a spell-checker

"It saves copies of the text of every page you visit."

This appears to include copies of your bank balances and other information from SSL encrypted pages.  http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39176/108/

How do you expect Google to deliver the ads you need unless you let them have your data?

Rest assured though that they won't use any of the submitted stuff for evil purposes.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

Currently there seems to be quite onerous licensing terms with the use of Chrome - where google lays claim to all content (eg. this post) if it was created via Chrome.

Those clauses have been terminated:

Google representative Rebecca Ward, head lawyer for Chrome, says the inclusion of Section 11 was a simple oversight, caused by the company's proclivity for releasing multiple products under a single, "Universal" Terms of Service.

"Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don't apply well to the use of that product," she said Tuesday. "We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service."

Even better, Ward says the change will be applied "retroactively" to "all users who have downloaded Google Chrome."

Methinks it was the very loud and very early backlash against the terms rather than oversight on Google's part, but who knows?

Somewhere in my soul, there's always Rock -n- Roll... Joe Strummer