So I've been watching the Google blog feed all day for the Chrome announcement; I naturally downloaded and installed it when I saw the announcement. I have a few thoughts about it after using it for a few minutes:

• It's very fast to startup and very fast to load pages. Oh... it's fast.
• It's text search feature is better than Firefox's. It shows you where every found item is in the scroll bar, it tells you how many "hits", and it lets you cycle through them. And it's fast.
• I love the minimal UI. A row of tabs, a row of buttons/location bar, and then a large area for the webpage. It's much like IE7 in that respect, except that IE7 has a title bar and Chrome doesn't (and that makes a difference).
• Downloading doesn't pop up a new window; it displays a quick animation close to the bottom of the window signifying that a download began. It then adds a toolbar with a button containing the download information (file name, amount downloaded, amount of the total download, and time left). All downloads default into %USERPROFILE%\My Documents\Downloads\. You can view all downloads by clicking a link button in the toolbar; it opens a new tab instead of a window.
• Printing a page results in a printed page I'd expect. Safari always seems to print entirely too small. I don't know if that's a product of Webkit, it's font rendering, or what. I can't seem to find a print preview.
• "Creating Applcation Shortcuts" is a nice little feature thanks to Google Gears. It creates a shortcut, but opens up a new window as any app would do; kinda handy if that's the only thing you want to do.
• [Edit]: No RSS or XML formatting whatsoever. XML gets displayed as a blob of text.
• [Edit]: Creating a new tab brings up a page much like Opera's speed dial, except it's populated from the history. It also has a history search box and lists recent bookmarks.
• [Edit]: I can't seem to find a Bookmark manager. So if you want to remove something from the bookmarks, you have to go to that page and click the star in the location bar.

I've never liked Webkit's Inspector, and it looks like that's included. Of course, Firebug floated my boat long ago, and anything else has some big shoes to fill. I especially don't like that the Inspect is launched in a new window. Firebug has me spoiled...

I still have some playing around to do. I'm going to use this exclusively for a week. But if Google put in a plug-in architecture, I'm sold.