Smoke them Chromes

Very first impressions about Google Chrome:

• It made me think back to '98 or so, when I installed BeOS on a PowerMac. I suddenly realized that the hardware was really quite fast; the software was slow. Even in this nascent state, Chrome renders things fast and well. [and I don't understand why Safari doesn't render as well]
• I like the clean UI. The first thing I do when I run a web browser on any fresh OS installation is to strip the browser to the bare minimum: minimal menus, all widgets on a single line in the toolbar. The little contextual popups showing link information are great. The integration of search and address bar is at once brilliant and at the same time obvious. I wonder if we could get rid of more of that negative space above the tabs.
• It runs strangely slowly (for me, for these brief moments) on a VMWare image of Vista hosted on MacOS. It seems to be choking on something network-related, possibly DNS lookups. I'm not sure why that might be. Maybe I just need to reboot that VM; I have been monkeying with my network a bit. [no, there is definitely something odd going on with DNS]

Overall, a very promising start. There is quite a bit of polish here, particularly in the installation and preference-setting, things that often get relegated to those last few moments before launch.

I can't wait for a MacOS build. I can't wait to hack on the MacOS build.