I think that the reaction of some sectors of the Mozilla community when Chrome was released was a bit too defensive. Looks like some people are so inmerse into the Mozilla world they can’t accept that sometimes people from outside have great ideas too and they have to say the last word.
One of the things I am more concerned about is how Mozilla leverages so much on extensions. Extensions are wonderful, nobody doubts that, but they’re not the end of everything in the browser market. I mean, not everything can be acomplished using extensions, and not everybody wants to have to install a dozen of extensions to get the features they want, apart from the perfomance hit that installing extensions involves.
By the way, according to the last info I heard from Flock folks, about only 10% of users of Mozilla-based products install extensions. So, there’s still place for browsers that implement a whole set of useful features out-of-the-box; probably not targeted to the same public Firefox is, but definitely a place.
A really clean interface, a fast loading time, a wealthy set of features and an amazing comic book that try to teach everybody (even non-techies) how it works are the things I like the most of Chrome. Like Python’s “import this” states, “If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea”. Every good project/application should be explainable in a comic.
And the best of Chrome is that it’s Open Source! Congratulations everybody! 馃槈