I'm not usually much of a beta software guy, but I saw the new Chrome browser (http://www.google.com/chrome) from Google last week at the Business of Software conference and have been seeing articles in the news all week as I've been trying to get the Database Weekly newsletter done. So today I downloaded it to give it a try. Actually the multi-threaded aspect of it, separate processes for each page, really got me interested. I get hung browsers more often than I'd like with Firefox.

Things look interesting in it, the install was quick and dirty. It had me close Firefox and then imported settings. A few interesting things.

1. The toolbar above in the editor for Community server is gone, so I can't do hyperlinks. I'm sure that's an Active X control, but it's one I need.

2. It imported the cookie that grabs name/password from this site, but not the one from SQLServerCentral.com.

3. The tabs above the menu is weird for me. Not sure if I like that. I deal with the tabs I'm looking at more than the menu, so I'm surprised it's in that order.

4. A new tab brings me thumbnails of the last few places I've been.

5. ESPN, a busy site, renders well and quickly.

I'm going to run it side by side (I usually have two browsers open) with Firefox 2 for a couple days. I'll upgrade one machine to Firefox 3 as well and see what happens.