And I’m posting from it now. All in all a VERY satisfying browser, and this just from impressions of the first few minutes. Four tabs open and the memory footprint is similar to Firefox, and it’s running much faster than even that browser out of the box and unencumbered by add-ons. The interface is very clean. I do miss Live Bookmarks – I’ll have to find an alternative of some sort. It handles google applications very well, predictably. Netvibes is a little worrying though; it seems to be chewing up memory at a rate of knots – 8-16kb per second adding to its stack, maxing at 64Mb.

What the comic said about being able to use the task manager to target poorly programmed web sites appears to be correct! As to whether the browser is as bad an idea as some may think, I doubt the most pessimistic of predictions. Its built in VM for Javascript is a very good idea and appears at first glance to have the desired effect. Isolation of tabs into processes is a significant improvement on previous single-threaded browsers, and though it may yet just turn into a vehicle for google services, ads, and information gathering, its challenge to the duopoly of IE and FF and its use of new techniques is a great leap forward.

The only down side I have is that it will make testing more laborious for any development once it emerges from beta (if that ever happens, given the perpetual beta of gmail and google calendar!)

Update: A security flaw (due to the software being based on an old version of WebKit) has already been discovered in Chrome. I guess there will be more… And some people have chosen to comment on the browser in the same comic form used to Press Release it.