the other thing chrome has which was innovative I thought was to pre-cache dns lookups for every url on a page you load.... so when you click on a link it already has the ip address. this saves like 1 second per page they said in perceived responsiveness over a large set of pages. I'm pretty sure firefox will be getting this feature soon and ie9 too, it's so common sense.
chrome is most stable for windows... there is a beta release for mac there is a linux alpha release now apparently : http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/linux.html
I looked at some recent statistics for beta http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2355201,00.asp chrome 4 vs FF 3.6b1. chrome did win. I want to look at 3.7. Haven't tried it yet, thx for the heads up kiwi trader. I made an attempt at chrome in Ubuntu a month ago but it was too much of a hassle. I've had pretty good results with one called "Arora" in Linux. Supposed to only be 10,000 lines of code, works pretty well. I use both FF3.5 and Arora in Linux.
Yes it does run on Linux. Quite well on Ubuntu 9.04. There is a deb package so installing and updating is a snap. I've come across a couple of bugs, but it's quite usable. There are some reports that the Linux implementation is faster than Win or MAC. Suggestions are that this is due to the architecture of X11
3.7 is still slower than chrome but the difference isn't "user significant" and if you prefer the firefox suite of addons or the different feel then you'll like it (just pick up a nightly build and run the Nightly Tester Tools add on to override addons that say 3.7 might be too new for them). My opinion: Chrome is faster and if you like it and don't mind the lack of option control and the much reduced range of addons then go for it. I just like some stuff that firefox does (horizontal spacers in my directories for example).