And whenever a new browser hits the scene, I like to make sure that my content doesn't royally honk it up. Hence I'm a browser early-adopter. Thus far I'm happy to confirm that my site and games work on everything. A couple of things aren't centered properly on IE8 Beta1, but I'm not gonna risk fixing it and potentially breaking another browser elsewhere until I'm certain that the problem is gonna persist into the actual release.
On that note, I just got to playing around with Google Chrome, and here are my first impressions. . .
1. Wow. This is the nicest beta-anything I've ever installed. It's very solid and shows my content perfectly. I was a bit worried because Safari on Windows had some ugly plugin keyboard and mouse problems, but I figured those bugs were more related to Apple's shoehorning the Mac UI into Windows than the engine itself.
2. The tab motif works quite well and is very clean. Tabs can be torn off into separate windows or re-merged with others by just dragging.
3. If you use it on XP, you still get Vista-ish corner widgets. Dunno if that bothers you.
4. If you bring up the Windows task manager, you'll see that "chrome.exe" gets N plus 1 process entries where N is the number of tabs you have open. Apparently each tab is a separate Windows process, which is smart because that means that a buggy page or plugin won't freeze the whole browser (hello Firefox). Just for kicks, I killed one of the chrome.exe processes. The tab didn't close, but it turned black and displayed a "oooh, something horrible happened" message in the killed tab. It would be very nice if the processes could show the name of the tab ("chrome.exe - yahoo.com") and would quietly close the tab if I killed the tab's process in the task manager. That way it'd be easy to kill off badly-behaving pages without taking down the whole browser -- a big problem with Firefox.
5. I presume a plugin model is forthcoming. This ain't gonna supplant Firefox for me until it has a form-filler and a way to synchronize bookmarks.
6. I don't like the bookmark model. Bookmarks require their own toolbar. I'd much rather have a little bookmark button so I could save that vertical space.
7. Very few customization options. No real way to define helper apps for file-types, ala Firefox. With Firefox, I can easily tell it which player to run when I click on an MP3 because I have 3-4 apps that can play MP3 files.
8. Rendering pages looks great. Another complaint about Safari on Windows is that it used its own LCD type-sharpener rather than ClearType, so text just looked a little "off" compared to Firefox and IE. Page rendering is at least as nice as Firefox.
9. I got 65 on Acid3. Others are reporting numbers in the 70's if you leave the test running for a long time (apparently some of the Acid3 tests are very time-consuming). Webkit-based Safari brags that it's getting 100, so I'm not sure what's not yet wired up right. 65 is quite good, so I'm not complaining.
All in all, it's a very impressive first effort. It's not all there yet, but what is there is 100% solid. I can recommend it.
Opera still ranks number 1 browser for me. Why? Mouse gestures. I know Firefox has plugins for them, but I dislike Firefox for other reasons.
As you've commented I really hope for more customisation. Being able to add words to the "spell-checker" would be nice, for example. :-/
As for the Acid3 test, I get c.78. (From some brief research, the Acid3 test appears to have some completely arbitrary and hardware dependent bits... seems kinda silly for a "standards" test).