Google's Chrome: the V8 Pursuit Special of the Browser World

With half the web development and online media community downloading Google's new "Chrome" browser, I shudder to think of the amount of bandwidth Google's servers must be dishing up right now. That said, if there is one company that has the infrastructure to handle it, it's Google. But what about "Chrome" itself? Well I've only had the pleasure of using Chrome for just under half a day now. There are so many over-hyped, yet under-performing, products released online, that I had prepared myself to be bitterly dissapointed. And yet I am not. First off, Chrome is fast. Fast from the get-go: installation was a couple of clicks and then it was done. But the real speed seems to come from under the hood of Chrome itself. Where I noticed most of a speed up was with Javascript intensive sites, such as Google's own Gmail. I'm not on a particularly fast internet connection, so overall page load times weren't massively decreased, but any site with a mediocm of AJAX or so on, was noticably snappier. If Chrome takes off it will definetley be a boom for the more complex websites out there that are JS heavy. The rendering is pretty much what I expected, it's obviously a lot like Safari, due to both being based on the Webkit engine. I haven't found any sites yet which display any noticeable rendering bugs. Apart from the under-the-hood stuff, the biggest paradigm shift is the browser's UI. It is typical Google, clean and minimal. It really looks - and feels - different to any other browser. Gone are the multitudes of menus and icons. As a result, the viewing area is vastly enlarged, with only prominent UI element being the tabs, which them selves are snappy and responsive. For a beta product, it's amazingly stable, and I've tried to throw as much at it as I can. The only dissapointment is that it's Windows only for the moment. There's a couple of niggling features missing, but I assume they'll be patched in later. Right now, however, Google's Chrome is an impressive debut into the browser market.