I looked at Chrome when it was announced but was quickly disappointed. Now I agree that competition is great, and it's good to have a big company like Google trying to improve the browser.
As a web developer, there's no denying that this will sway a huge number of people over to Chrome and there for to a fairly advanced and standards compliant rendering engine (WebKit/KHTML). That's all great and maybe can push the whole industry forward in getting more standards and possibly finally get rid of the mess IE and Netscape have left us with.
The problem I have though is that Chrome has almost nothing new to offer in the overall browser market. I can't think of a single feature that Chrome offers that I can't find in another browser. Now, it's great to see these features finally make it to Windows because many of the cool and advanced browsers are currently for Mac or Linux only (such as Camino and Shiira which are both Mac only and offer most of the features Chrome now offers).
Google makes Chrome sound like some kind of new innovation that is supposed to be a huge improvement. Maybe to those who come from IE, but not for the rest of us who are on Linux, Macs or use Firefox. Where's the true innovation? Where's even a new rendering engine? Google just took what was already available as open source and packaged it up. It would've been better if all the new open source contributes Chrome will attract would work on the original projects that Chrome is based off!
As far as it being lightweight and small, it won't stay that way. All applications start small, but as users demand more and better features it'll start getting bloated. Especially as an open source project. And, how is Google going to incorporate the open source improvements? No doubt they'll be controlling what goes in, in which case they'll be no better than Apple keeping WebKit open source to improve Safari.
Basically for a company the size of Google I figured they'd release something more innovative, in the same way their original search engine improved on searching the web. The more I think about the more I see Google as an intellectual black hole. As a company they have a huge intellectual base, a lot of the world's best programmers are currently working at Google, yet very little actually comes out as a sum of them all.
