It's not just fast - it's amazingly fast. Clearly, they've done some really nifty things up and down the whole pipeline to speed things up, and I approve wholeheartedly.
The new JavaScript engine is just fantastic. Gmail just sings in this thing, and google maps is pretty spectacular. As the world gets more AJAX-y by the day, this is a really good direction to be moving, I think. Also, as someone who is essentially a web desinger who wishes he could use more client-side scripting in an efficient manner, this gets me really excited. (I know Mozilla keeps talking about how great Firefox will be eventually, but it's hard to argue with the kind of results that Chrome actually has.)
The integrated search / URL bar actually works. I know every other browser out there also has such a creature, but this thing is so much better it's ridiculous.
Tabs are each their own processes and fully sandboxed. Fantastic. Really - why didn't Firefox do this from day one? (Yes, I know. Because it was 1997 and they thought they were writing Netscape 6 when the code's foundation went down, and no one knew multi-core processors were going to become the norm. Still, though.)
Also, the google gears "web application link" thing is just super slick.
I tend to swap between browsers a lot for testing purposes in my day job as a developer of web-based data systems, and there are a lot of things about Firefox, Opera, and Safari I really like. Chrome has, essentailly, glued all the features I like together into one browser (quite literally in the case of the mozilla and webkit code bases).
And then, there's the Terms of Service, which are INSANE.
On the other hand, it's also a fully Open Source program, so I fully expect someone to start publishing "Bronze" as a TOS-free alternative.
But, on the gripping hand, what I'm really looking forward to is Firefox 4 ganking the half of the codebase that wasn't theirs to begin with.
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