Everybody is all excited about Google's new web browser, Chrome. I like to keep an arms length away from this kind of enthusiasm. Immature software requires scrutiny, not a free pass just because it comes from Google or Microsoft or Sun or Insert-Your-Favorite-Company here.

So I downloaded Chrome, installed it and have been using it exclusively for the past couple of days.

My first impression was that of malaise. Chrome was strange. The UI seemed, well, boring. There was nothing about Chrome that stood out enough to persuade the everyday user to make the switch from their favorite browser. I met Chrome with apathy.

Then I noticed how fast everything ran on Chrome. Insanely fast.

One of the first things I did was check out how myouvies.com ran on Chrome. I was expecting to see some layout issues and likely some performance quirks. What I found was that Chrome rendered myouvies.com perfectly and that myouvies.com ran considerably faster on Chrome than on any other browser.

I was impressed.

There was one last test I wanted to run - load StumbleUpon's directory page for the letter S. This task usually locks up Firefox and IE for a few seconds, turning those browsers to useless white boxes until the page is fully loaded. Chrome, as advertised, loads each tab in its own memory space, so while the unnecessarily large StumbleUpon page loads up in one Chrome tab, all the other tabs are unaffected.

I was free to continue browsing the internet. I could continue reading my GMail. I had been writing and article using Google docs that I could get back to working on. The slides I had half done using Google's presentation software, those were waiting for me. Nothing was locked up.

Sort of reminded me of an operating system.

Ah ha!