– It’s fast (very fast), especially for Javascript intensive pages

– It’s clean and friendly and uncluttered (always good)

– It’s not IE

 

I still don’t understand why Google didn’t just put their money behind Firefox though. Or, rather, I sadly think I do know: because they are seeking control of everything. Sure it’s Open Source, but they are still going to control the main branch of the code and have the distribution power to make it count. So integration with their own apps is a given and no-one is going to be able to fiddle the source code to change that, open source or not.

 

That said, it’s undeniably going to grab enormous market share fairly quickly. The test is whether it provides something superior to Firefox, whose “extension” model along with a lot of enthusiastic users is going to hard (and kind of tragic) to undermine.