It’s been over a month since it was released, and I thought I’d give my two cents worth, no matter how banal it may be.  Overall it’s an awesome initial effort from Google!  It is definitely faster than Firefox on my laptop and any slight improvement like that is a welcome plus.  The built-in developer tools and task manager, though not yet on the par of Firefly, are a great addition to an initial release.  Some of the UI effects are slick, such as the download statusbar, and its built-in support for ‘web applications’ is a neat, new feature (to me at least).

That said what I’m really waiting for is to see what happens in the future, specifically their support of add-ons, or extensions.  There were rumors early on that Chrome may support Firefox add-ons natively (similar to AvantBrowser’s Orca), but recently Google said they were going to be creating their own extension system.  A system that they hope is more stable and does not impact the browser’s overall performance.

For now I’m sticking with Firefox 3 until said extension system is completed and we see what types of extensions can be and/or are built.  You can use a proxy like Privoxy to replace Adblock Plus, and there is Greasemetal to allow you to use (some) Greasemonkey scripts in Chrome.  But they really need a vibrant extension community to pull over users like myself, as the performance of Firefox is getting better with each new release and is good enough to keep me from moving away from my highly customized browser.

Related to this, something that slightly worries me is Google’s past history regarding product development.  Don’t get me wrong I love all of their tools such as Docs, Maps, etc. but things like Gmail are still in beta after over 3 years have passed.  New features that you feel would just be built in are being slowly offered via optional Labs settings.  Though Google did an excellent job with their initial releases of Gmail and Chrome, they really need to keep the new features or innovations coming to keep users interested.  This is where extensions are so important, as no one at Google (or Mozilla) could come up with all of these trinkets on their own.