Google released chrome today. You can also check it out here and here. Although I am not an uber-geek with the daskeyboard, I would say chrome is the next breed of browser. Firefox 3, safari, opera, and the infamous IE are soon to become the univac's of the browser world, and igniting a new browser war.

 If you read through the 30+ page google book you will see how they re-wrote the browser to support independent multiple threads and introduced a JS-VM. It supports Google Gears so developers can get into well enough. You can detach a window from the tabs and move it around like an app window.... kewl.

I cruised over to the  IE 8 beta site and it's not too specific on features, but they seem to be still thinking in the established architecture and single-threads. But I can't be sure.

Chrome is extremely efficient by running a process for each tab you display in the browser, and it shares common global memory structures. Complex web-pages will load super-quick in Chrome. Not long ago I was comparing Notes 8's memory footprint being actually less than that of Firefox 3. Chrome is a different beast entirely.

Because Chrome runs a thread for each tab, it's extremely kind to the OS' memory by chunking it down into small memory stacks and greatly improves memory management, thereby eliminating performance problems with one fat memory stack. So where could this lead ?

Coupling Chrome with google doc's will certainly make things more interesting in about 12 months. With a genuinely thin and smart client available for free, the level of functionality of currently rich web-apps can now go to another level. Symphony could also learn something from this as well.