After trying the IE 8 Beta2 I thought it would be appropriote to talk about Chrome.  My first thoughts after reading the Google Comic was that it was going to be really fast and very unstable with the V8 engine.  My tests showed that its actually pretty stable ( about as stable as Safari or Opera ) but not really fast.  The only site I think it actually handles faster is Gmail.  Facebook is definitely slower, which is also a heavy Javascript site.  If v8 was really gonna shine it would be on Facebook.  I’m not sure if Chrome is just optimized for Gmail or if there are components of Gmail preloaded in Chrome.  It would be kinda smart of Google do to that, IE8 has benefited from Windows pre-loading stuff for years.

One area which was a great surprise was the developer tools.  Its has the equivalent of Firebug built-in ( Mircosoft, where is yours? ) and it includes a javascript console.  Its going to be great to debug/develop Javascript environments but unfortunately I don’t really see it challenging IE or even Firefox.  I think Firefox is still a better browser experience and the reports are that v3.1 is going to be even faster for Javascript processing.

As it stands it might be a browser I leave open as kind of my Gmail client but I’m not going to invest alot of time it switching over to it.