I had no trouble loading any pages and even complex pages such as my netvibes.com customized homepage (which is slow to load on other browsers) seemed to load very quickly (and this was in a virtual machine!).

Despite this being a 1.0 release, Google has already included some more “advanced” features such as a source code view option that includes coloured markup and a DOM inspector feature. 

The “tabs on top” UI choice doesn’t really bother me – I didn’t find it inherently better than the standard tab model either though.

What is interesting is how sparse the UI is otherwise though. It mirrors Google.com in many ways: You won’t find a menu bar anywhere in the main window, just a limited number of understated buttons and a clean consistent look – quite a relief when compared with IE 7 and Firefox 3′s busy, crowded looks. 

The good

• The home screen with your latest bookmarks and most frequently visited pages looks more practical than launch pages such as Netvibes or iGoogle.
• Bookmarking with a single click
• Google searches directly from the address bar
• Intelligent address shortening (e.g. “jetplanejournal.com/2008/08/jetplane-review-v-moda-vibe-duo” is truncated to www.jetplanejournal.com in your history and recent addresses)

The bad

The dreaded beachball of slowness starts cropping up, new tabs take a while to load and memory usage seems to go through the roof.

By setting themselves the target of speed, reliability and efficiency first, Google is addressing all the frustrations typical of other browsers. By making the browser multi-process based, they also have a fresh technological approach that might mark an interesting new direction for browser design.

I predict people will complain about the lack of certain comfort features at first, but at least for my personally, the quickest, most stable browser wins every time.

The comic explaining the design choices behind the browser is particularly interesting and a fantastic way to explain what makes the browser appealing to a non-technical audience. It outlines how Google has basically leveraged the fact that a google search is how most web browsing is begun nowadays and built the browser accordingly using this experience.

More competition for Firefox and Safari can only be a good thing, but they’re still only competing for ~30% of the market. 

Consider this scenario: Google puts a link to Chrome on the Google homepage, reaching the other 70% of users running Internet Explorer currently blissfully unaware of browser alternatives.

Mark my words: The chairs will be flying in Redmond come Wednesday.