Chrome a little disappointing

I had high hopes for Google's new Internet browser Chrome becomming my "application" browser on Windows. You see I currently run two browsers at all times. Firefox for general browsing and development (can't beat plugins like greasemonkey), and Safari for windows for accessing web applications (like google apps).

The reason I do this is two fold. One, Safari is faster than Firefox and two, that lets me restart my application browser semi-regularly without losing all my browsing.

I hoped Chrome would help in two ways. Firstly the V8 JavaScript VM comes from heavy hitters like Lars Bak of Strongtalk and Java HotSpot VM fame (per Avi) so you know it is fast; secondly it runs a separate process per tab, so the days of screwy javascript or flash crashing your other tabs are over.

But to be honest, in practice it was underwhelming. On Windows XP with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo processor the expense of windows process startup was noticable, and the startup time for google apps was easily 3 times that of the latest Safari nightly build.

Safari on Windows can be a little clunky, but the combination of it plus Firefox continues to be a winning setup for me.