I know that millions of readers are constantly hitting F5, eager to read my opinion on the new kid in town - Google Chrome. As always I will not disappoint them.

   First of all, let me remind you that the Web is broken. We, web developers, are deep in the shit, barely managing to keep our heads on the surface and Google Inc., being the nice people that they are, are coming our way with huge buckets of more shit. Now to the list of different kinds of shit that contains IE6, IE7, Fx2, Fx3, Opera and Safari we can add Google Chrome and IE8. Yeah, that was my dream in the last year because it is clear that we do not have enough browsers. Thank you Google Inc.

   I hate to admit it but it seems like Chrome tastes better than the other kinds of shit. Of course that only makes it more dangerous. The only really innovative feature is the in-browser task manager which is cool. All other features we have seen in other browsers. However Chrome has arguably the best selection of features and probably the best implementation. The list of cool features includes resizeable textareas, incognito mode, search hints in the address bar, creating a new window from a tab by dragging and many more. Regular features like phishing filter and spellchecker are also present. Right now the beta only works on Windows but versions for non-standard operating systems are undoubtedly coming. The interface is minimalistic and beautiful (not to be confused with minimalistic and ugly like Firefox). I like it.

   Of course Chrome has its downsides. The file upload control defies all conventions and I cannot read the name of the file when uploading the Chrome logo in this article. Marked text also looks bad. The worst of all is that there is no RSS reader nor does Chrome recognize RSS feeds on pages. How is my multi-million reader base supposed to be informed about new wisdom from me?

   On the technical side Chrome is very interesting. Every tab is a separate process. That is why you can see like 10 instances of chrome.exe in the Task Manager which is annoying. However this makes the browser more secure, more stable and faster. On the downside it eats a lot of memory. I tried a few quick tests and Chrome always used more memory than IE (as reported by Chrome's own "stats for nerds"). It seems like the exact difference depends on the websites in the tabs but the test with my regular 10 tabs that I keep open all the time showed Chrome using 130MB vs 100MB for IE7 but when IE7 goes idle for a while I have observed that IE's memory is reduced to 20-30MB. It seems like Chrome does not do this (cannot be sure though) so the difference is like 3-4 times. According to Wikipedia IE8 also features similar multiprocess architecture and that is good because RAM is cheap.

   It SEEMS TO ME that Chrome is much faster than IE7 on sites like Yahoo Mail and Facebook that are Ajax heavy. I cannot find considerable difference on normal sites. It SEEMS TO ME that StarCraft 2's website is considerably slower in Chrome than in IE but it renders with really strange methodology (with XSLT) which is not that common. The rendering engine is said to be Webkit (used in Konqueror and Safari) but I doubt it is unchanged so expect problems different from that in other Webkit based browsers. Lets hope the changes are too small and we are not faced with yet another rendering engine.

   Lets try to look on the positive side of Chrome. It is much more likely to get the attention of Firefox, Opera and Safari users than that of IE users. While Google Inc. has signed a contract to give Firefox money for another 3 years there is a good chance that Chrome will send other non-MS browsers into oblivion and that will be good for all. Please all of you who are using the awful Firefox switch to Chrome today. Of course it would be best that you switch to IE but since you are not going to do that at least switch to Chrome so we can have 2 browsers instead of 22.

   Finally it is worth noting this no-blog works like a charm with Chrome (except for the lack of RSS support) and actually looks better than on Firefox (not as good as on IE7 though).