It’s BSD licensed. It seems to be fairly fast. It imported my current Firefox 3.0 profile without a hitch. The tabs support middle-click close and are very fast to do so. It even fits into Vista’s Glass style properly, which the screenshots previously shown didn’t make obvious:

In fact, I’ve already run into an annoying issue with it – if you delete all the text from the WordPress text field, it deselects the field – but it’s not exactly lethal.

Chrome’s multiprocessing isn’t a joke either. Right now, I have seven tabs open – with nine processes showing in Task Manager. Close one and it goes down to eight. Total memory usage appears to be about 150% that of Firefox, but process size appears to depend on how complex the page is – a new Firefox 3.0 on my desktop machine with the same tabs open as Chrome uses 63MB while Chrome uses a total of 98MB, with some of the page process sizes being as low as 1MB and the biggest appearing to be the main application (36MB). HQ Youtube videos play absolutely fine in the background. It doesn’t experience the same slowdown as Firefox when opening multiple pages at the same time either and trying to work with another. It’s a very competent beta.

It even has a rather nice object inspection window that reminds me of Firebug:

This includes a time/size graphing facility too, and you can edit those CSS properties in-line. They have been thorough.

Remember when Safari came out for the Mac and was a step ahead of almost everything else? Chrome is like that for Windows and it’ll be like that for any platform it comes out on. It’s quick, slim-looking and uses animation sparingly and well. It’s obviously had a whole lot of thought put into it and, being open source, it should hopefully have so much more.

(Poking around in its install directory – incredibly, it installs direct to your local profile on Vista, which is probably a violation of something – reveals a “Themes” directory with a single .dll in it, a “Resources” directory with the JavaScript-based inspector in it, Google Gears as a .dll plugin and an updater. No doubt there’s more goodies deep in there.)

But in short, what it needs is Adblock Plus (or equivalent) and a Mac version for my laptop and it’ll be my main browser. Come on, Google, do your best.