Its finally official. 3-way battle on with IE Vs FF Vs Chrome

Google Chrome
I downloaded Google Chrome on my Windows XP SP2 machine tonight and played around with it.
Great
First and foremost, I dont have to restart my computer after the installation, which is not the case with IE beta 8. Microsoft are you listening. This is 2008, I dont have to restart my computer for the install to complete.
Docked elements like "find, download, etc.," they are awesome. if you want them as free floating, you can drag them out of their dock. Neat idea, (though not invented by google, they brought it to browser. BTW, IE 8 also has similar feature). Best part about this, even "status bar" is a docking element...
Webkit - Use of a JavaScript engine that was created from scratch. You dont need to be a genius to think about that. I am just glad someone finally brought it to the forefront. (Okay Safari already uses it, but hey when it comes from Google it sounds sooo good lol)
Phising API that can be used by anyone. Even if Chrome doesnt go mainstream, this is a good idea,
Open Source/Open Standards - This may be Great or Good or bad depending on how you see it. It sounds good. to associate any tech product today with anything that starts with "Open" similar to "Green". My doubt who else participated in this "so-called" open standards. Hope it does become true open standard in future.
Opening the page for history and bookmarks list as a webpage on its own was a great idea. Dont know where they are taking the browser inbuilt bookmark feature. Can it replace delicious/digg finally?
Stats for nerds, love that feature. Does it officially make me a nerd... dont know, now I have the stats for nerds played around with it a lot. actually spent more time on it than anything else... Launched facebook, myspace and linkedin among IE 7, FF 3 and Chrome. IE 7 has highest memory usage (no surprise in that), followed by FF then by chrome. What was surprising is that even though I did not do anything, the memory occupied by FF and Chrome was increasing every other second... At one point they both were exceeding memory occupied by IE7 by 25% and their original memory size by 40%. After sometime they both dropped to their initial usage and again they were increasing gradually. Dont know what causes this. After 15 mins or so, IE actually dropped its memory usage by 15%... At this point, I dont buy the fact that Chrome is superior to other browsers when it comes to memory usage based on my benchmark...
Good
V8 - Precise/Incremental garbage collection. Dont know if this is good or bad. There are lot of people that has done pretty good research on benefits of different garbage collection mechanism. Obviously google's documents tend to show precise is better than traiditional garbage collection used by other browsers. Good read on precise vs conservative and incremental vs concurrent can be found at wikepedia
Omnibar which is nothing but a copy of Awesome bar from FireFox. So it should be good
InCognito, is again nothing new than what is already there in Safari or InPrive in IE 8.
When I had 3 tabs running, there were 4 "chrome.exe" running on my task manager (this is per design). But I can not kill any of them individually from task manager. If I kill even one of them, entire "chrome" crashes...
Do check out http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome. Cool chrome comic (not as dramatic as marvel)
Bad
Probably Google fan boys may not like these comments, but if they take the face value and make appropriate changes, it would make the browser better.
When I clicked on "Change proxy settings" under "Options/Under the hood" it launched IE's "Options/Internet properties" dialog box. Is this a BUG or intended feature. If this is a bug, google need to run their story tests more thoroughly then what their marketing campaign says.
Plug-ins did not work (Flash/Silverlight). After all the documentation about how they rearchitected the design of plug-in use in browser, if there is no plug-in to demonstrate then why release a marketing campaign before you have a functionality working/released.
Hey, Google, before you automatically adding "GoogleUpdate.exe" in my system startup, atleast provide me an option to disable it. Boneheaded decision like this is what put MS where they are now today. Dont follow their footsteps.
Ugly
As of today, 85% of Mozilla's revenue and some good chunk change for Opera is provided and funded by Google. Ofcourse by paying their bills, they are influencing these products. Question, if Chrome generates some momentum, what happens to FF. I dont want Chrome to replace FF/Opera. If it is just going to gain majority market share from FF/Opera, then guess what, we dont need Chrome. Just keep the spigot flowing to FF to keep MS on its toes. I dont want Chrome to become Linux, where Linux replaced UNIX OS in enterprises and left only a smaller dent to MS Windows. Not that I dont like Linux, but if I were to choose between Linux and Unix, I would pick Unix (ofcourse the price tag of Unix still keeps me thinking)
I smell world domination. New evil empire, this time it is not microsoft...

{ Gaja; }