In a nutshell, and from the relatively little time I've had to play with it, it seems to deliver on at least some of the promises. I did a little test driving to compare it with Firefox 3 (and IE8 for that matter), and here's what I found.
The install went through without a hitch - it downloads a small installer which then gets the rest of the stuff and installs it all. The whole thing went through in under 5 minutes on a moderate DSL connection.
Chrome launches pretty fast - a shade faster than Firefox, and about as fast as IE8. Many of the shortcuts are similar to those in Firefox and/or IE, so getting started is a breeze. The rendering seems a trifle slower than Firefox. But what I really wanted to test was the memory footprint and the claims of running each tab as a separate process so that memory could be fully reclaimed when tabs are closed - and on that, Chrome seems to deliver the goods!
I opened several tabs in both FF 3.0.1 and Chrome (0.2.149.27) - slashdot, freshmeat, MySpace, Facebook, Google Maps, and a few other random pages. FF holds up pretty well while the tabs are being added - with about 8 tabs open, FF was at around 100 MB, while Chrome was touching 190 MB. Both were pretty responsive, however. Closing about half the tabs brought Chrome down to around 97 MB, while FF came down to 90 MB. Not bad at all, FF! But back down to just one tab, and Chrome was at 52 MB, while FF was still hovering around 73 MB. This bears out almost exactly what the Chrome comic book talks about - a slightly higher memory usage because of the individual processes, but ability to reclaim all memory from tabs that are closed.
The other really nice feature is the start page that shows the 9 most often opened URLs. It's a pretty neat way of getting started, without having to start typing in FUUs (frequently used URLs).
Chrome also registered all available plugins including Flash, Java and multimedia, so there was absolutely no setting up anything else to get going with media rich sites.
All in all, a pretty good first run with the Beta release. I can't wait to have the same thing on Linux!
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