Google desperately wants browser marketshare. My guess is that by taking it out of beta and announcing an official version 1.x as stable, they'll be able to finalize few distribution deals with PC OEMs. OEMs don't like shipping beta stuff (even though some stuff they ship is worse than most betas you'd try from MS or Google) so this will pacify them. In short, this is just a marketing move on their part... don't read much into tech side of things at all.
Exactly. I love chrome and can't wait for the plugins, scripts and Linux ports.
Minimalist: Check
Fast: Check
Secure: Check
Its a win for me, Firefox is great and I will always love it but I could never get a good theme for Firefox that would return my screen and I never liked the download manager, and the bloat.
I was fooled by good Chrome UI design myself, but after careful tweaking of Firefox with good theme and plugins I just can't use Chrome, I switched back to Firefox completely, it's so much better in every way...
I find chrome has a few problems, firstly it can start to perform very badly when many tabs are open - a bit buggy, and secondly it does not display as many pages correctly as firefox.
All in all I love the speed of chrome - but reliability of firefox is still a very big + for me.
