Update: Holy SHIT the popup blocker is annoying. It spawns this window at the bottom that, for the life of me I haven't figured out how to automatically close. That's right, folks, the popup blocker spawns a popup. It doesn't just go away after a while, either, but lingers, accumulating disgustingly at the bottom of the screen like some ersatz taskbar. WTF.
Edit: Looks like I missed the option under web content, which is funny because I actually dug into the gears settings to find it. I guess that allows me to sidestep the issue of getting bombarded by overlapping windows if I want to know when something's been blocked. So basically we have a choice of Google silently executing potentially innocent popups without us ever knowing (such popups are very common for office web-apps), or having to manually close malicious popup notifications, sort of defeating the point of the whole endeavor. Godamnit, even IE has a more space-saving way of notifying me.
Also, the maximized window prevents me from getting to my taskbar, which I have set to autohide. Many question the utility of the oft-broke autohide in the first place, but anyone running an Xx768 resolution and forces all full screen apps into windows would probably disagree. Hopefully, these gripes are minor and will be rectified soon enough.
I am noticing better load times. Significantly better in some cases. Edit/Update: This is an understatement. I can burn through fresh doc loads using the forward/back keys, loading fresh copies every time, faster than anything I've experienced before.
Killing the extra search bar has been long overdue; I'm glad they did it.
Excellent use of screen real estate; I run my box sitting across a coffee table with an LCD TV, and it really presents a tradeoff between space and readability; which this seems to handle marginally better than FF3. Zoom, unfortunatley, only resizes text and not images and certain layout panels, which can completely wreck the layout of a page and make it even more difficult to read than before. Yeah, most people probably don't even know about the zoom function on any browser, but I live and die by it...and if I zoom in on a page, I'd appreciate it if the whole thing was magnified, and not just the text. If they can't fix this or at least give us the option to fix it ourselves, than unfortunatley, it's a no-go.
Haven't really tried the incognito feature yet. It's a nice touch, but I suspect that anyone who would regularly make use of this type of feature has already streamlined a process of doing so in their old browser (heh). There are FF3 plugins that perform similar tasks, though probably not as effectively. Considering MS has something very similar to this in the works, Firefox will probably follow suit with something built in and this will not be a killer feature at all.
Update: I must have a hearty LOL at something I noticed with Incognito; namely all of the Google ads are for criminal record searches and PI's for hire. Talk about preconceived notions.
More peeves concern the fact that all the nice addons for FF3 are obviously absent here. I don't have my stumbleupon bar, my fire fm, and more importantly, adblock and my tweak for tab cycling. It's infuriating how these open source browsers continually ignore the superiority of the windows/opera alt-tab cycling style in favor of one that is just plain annoying; it effectively caps how many tabs you can conveniently surf between without going for annoying extra keystrokes or the mouse.
Unless they go all out with addons, I don't see myself converting anytime soon. But hell, if they can make a stumbleupon bar for opera, this will be a not brainer.
I'm also worried about the fact that Google's tendency to collect usage stats for ad targetting is going to limit the extent to which Chrome will support an ad-free, as-private-as-you-want environment a la Firefox. It may be consentual, but would saying no possibly limit the featureset that would put it above its peers? I know I would lose %75 of my Google Desktop's utility if I disabled indexing and usage stats, and that's just not acceptable. To be sure, I don't see any browser features that would require this sort of disclosure, but you never know what they might pull out their asses, and if it turns out to be pure gold, I don't want to miss out because I am reluctant to open yet another facet of my usage to google.
I haven't spoken much about the actual guts of the technology, because I don't know enough yet to comment on it, but everything I've read seems to point to a much more efficient, not to mention safer way to handle browsing potentially dangerous sites. Still, if they can't rectify certain issues with the interface and get the ball rolling on extensions, this might well end up being to Firefox what Cul or whatever the name was was to Goog.
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