Day 1 With Chrome

I've now spent a day with Google Chrome (or at least since it came out early this afternoon).  Conclusions thus far:

• It is really fast.  I'm not talking about 'yeah, I think it seems a bit faster than Firefox and IE,' I'm talking about a very obvious, very marked difference in performance.  The first visit to a busy page like cnn.com and it's very apparent that it renders much faster than my normal browser (Firefox 3).  The one process per tab approach is going to be a welcome change, as well.
• It seems stable, despite the 0.2.x version label.  I haven't had any crashes yet so far.  I suppose this makes sense, as Brandon tells me that they internally eat dog food like this for a long time before it's even released in a beta form like this.
• Rendering incompatibility seems very rare.  I know that Guidewire applications won't render perfectly in Chrome as of yet (people were quick to satisfy that curiosity), but I have yet to come across any of my normal daily sites that showed obvious rendering issues.  I suppose this shouldn't be a huge surprise either, being based on an established engine (WebKit).  I'd think that it's site compatibility would be roughly equal to (or if they've done extra work, better than) what is seen in Apple Safari (also WebKit based).  I read on a site earlier today that Google has internally built a site compatibility test harness that runs against the top several thousand most popular sites (and if anyone would have that data, it'd be Google!) and farms this testing out across Google machine clusters, allowing them to test on the order of 10,000 sites on a brand new build within 20-30 minutes.  Pretty sweet.

I think I'll keep using this until I run into something that is too broken to keep going with it; I'm not sure I'm going to bump into any such thing!

I also see that Picasa 3.0 beta came out today, with automated facial recognition (meant to help auto-tag people).  Big release day at GOOG!