Like all good geeks, I installed Google Chrome the other day.  I like the idea of Chrome (i.e. another major browser to encourage innovation) and I also like some of the major features they have announced.  Having one tab which crashes not take down the browser is a good thing.

Even though the UI is sleek, I find the color scheme to look bizarre with my dark theme.  Maybe we'll be able to modify it with some javascript or css.

I created an application shortcut for Google Reader, just to see what it would do.  It's very interesting.  Basically, it gets its own window, without a tab bar, location bar, or menu bar.  The menu is completely embedded in the control box (the little icon at the top left of the window.)  In this mode, that icon, and the icon in the windows task bar are both the Google Reader icon.  Nice touches.  It does have interesting behavior when clicking links.  These launch a new browser window, but as Carl points out, those tabs live inside the same process as Google Reader.  Any links followed from that tab (in a new tab, window, or incognito window) all live in the same process.  Even if you manually navigate in those tabs, by typing in a URL, they still live in the same process.  This is definitely not what I was expecting.

One other thing I found to be very bizarre is the install location.  Just like Live Mesh, Chrome installed inside my user profile.  I installed it on my work dev machine where I have local Admin privs. so its not a huge deal, but I find the choice to be very strange.

I will continue to play with it, but there are a few things obviously missing which will keep it from being my default browser: Delicious, Ad Block Plus, spell checker, etc.