Google Chrome - First look

So after a long and anxious wait, its finally available to the public, and I've been using Google Chrome all morning.

It seems to be fast and quick and as expected, user friendly.

Quick takes:

• Minimalistic look, with maximum space given to the web page / content. Even the status bar is overlayed on the page when necessary and dissapears when not.
• Intuitive interface. Switching between tabs is fast (compared to both IE and mozilla). Each tab is sandboxed separately so a slowdown or crash in one of them doesnt crash the browser (havent tested this though).
• icon on tab to the left of page title (before the favicon appears) is a rotating arc, showing a 'busy' state. Anti clockwise rotation until the site is determined, clockwise after download begins.
• Handy address bar: intelligent autocomplete for urls. google search results also supplement the options for easy selection.
• Frequently browsed pages appear as a matrix on newly opened tabs. Quickly resume where the last session left off.
• Most other features work as in firefox, including shortcuts.

Cons:

• It takes the connection settings from IE. So everytime you need to change a proxy, for instance, you will have to tweak your IE setting.
• Closing the entire browser does not prompt you for confirmation. Neither does it save the tabs to be reloaded at next start.
• No easy way to bookmark pages. Right-clicking on the tab or the page doesn't have a bookmark option. The only way, as I see it, is to go into bookmarks and add the link manually. 
• Drag drop of tabs onto bookmark toolbar doesnt work.
• the "forward" and "back" buttons dont have a drop down menu to jump into history more than a step. 

Issues

• On my laptop, the touchpad scroll works fine when scrolling down, but scroll up doesnt happen. I check with firefox and it works fine there, but on chrome it just doesnt. Something that needs to be fixed.

Havent gone deeper than this so far. Next thing to do is probably test it out on wine for Linux. After that, probably check if the settings and preferences are exportable if I need to get back to firefox later.

So far it seems chrome will cut into firefox's user share pretty easily. I'm already a chrome-user :P. Find out more and more and more. 

Below: A video by google on the philosophy behind the need for chrome.