Google's Chrome Browser: First Impressions

First let me say WOW!  Chrome beta looks very promising.  I was first impressed before the browser's download was available by the Chrome comic book.  It provides a great developer-centric explination to why Chrome is fast, secure, and quite possibly the future model of all internet browsers.

Once I got it downloaded and installed (very easy process by the way), most of my favorite web sites rendered fast and seemlessly.  My favorite feature so far is being able to search from the address bar.  For instance, if you type in google and then <tab>, it will prompt you to enter a search term and will search for it via Google.  The same principle holds true for any web site you visit that has search enabled for it.  Once you visit the site and if it has searching capabilities, you can run a search from the browser address bar.  It works for non-search engine sites too; for instance it will work for searching cnn.com.

Of course this beta isn't without its faults (or faults of non-confirming web sites?).  Here are some of them I have found so far:
- In other tabbed browsers, if you close the browser and there are multiple tabs open, the browser warns that you are closing everything, not just the current tab.  Chrome doesn't do that but I wish it did.
- It's new so some plugins naturally aren't available.  Silverlight, for instance.
- I've noticed some very minor CSS conformity problems
- I use a web site that has a free textbox-style editing control and the toolbar to edit the text wasn't visible
- Hotmail: yeah it works but it prompts you that you aren't using a known browser and proceedes to display a stripped-down version of Hotmail.  Any site that relies on custom code to target certain browsers will most likly have a similar problem.

So, I'm keeping the browser installed and will use it as much as possible because I see lots of potential here.  If you're a web developer: really - take a look at that Chrome comic book for an excellent explination of what Google has done here.  It's really impressive and way outside the box.