Google are due to release a new browser, called Chrome, tomorrow. So, here are my initial (i.e., pre-release) thoughts on it, based solely on what they’ve said about it so far.

• Initial release will Windows-only; Mac OS X and GNU/Linux versions coming Real Soon Now. Nice to see that even Google, with their thousands and thousands of GNU/Linux machines, treat anybody not using Windows as second-class citizens. Hardly unexpected by now, but still irritating.
• I’m glad to see that they’ll be releasing it as free software; hopefully, they’ve the sense to use the GPL or something, rather than a new licence of their own design.
• I’m not convinced by the tabs-as-separate-processes thing; is there really an advantage over tabs-as-separate threads, that outweighs the additional overhead of separate processes? I admit that I don’t know enough about memory management to seriously evaluate this one, though.
• They make a big deal about webapps, but say nothing of the client side; will there be anything along the lines of Firefox’s extensions API? Gem suggests supporting Firefox extensions directly, which may be difficult without XUL support; an equivalent API is a must, though.

Beyond that: we’ll see?

Update: um, today, apparently. About to try it out under WINE.