I downloaded Chrome right after I heard about it. While free time hasn’t been abundant recently, who doesn’t jump at the chance to kick the tires of a new browser? 
I even have a “degrees of separation” relationship with Chrome — a friend who moved to Denmark for CS grad school is on the V8 team. He had blogged that he was working for Google and I had wondered what he was working on. When I got to the page in the “comic book” that describes the new javascript vm which was created by a team in Arhus, my immediate reaction was “holy f***!” Said with love and admiration, of course…
So far my experience has been positive if not mind-blowing. Performance has been my biggest complaint particularly on pages with embedded flash. Not a deal breaker and Chrome is beta, after all.
I just spotted a really slick feature and had to blog it. When searching for a word or phrase on a long-ish web page, check out the scroll bar. Gold bars highlight page locations where your word was found. For an example, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia and search for “Putin”. Slick!
