Yes

I agree with this, and you might add the buggy codebase of FF in there too.

It's instructive to remember that firefox started out as a paring down of bloated Mozilla code. Ultimately, Mozilla dropped navigator and made FF its default browser.

Dave Hyatt, one of the FF initiators, ultimately left and went to work on webkit, a totally new rendering project that started out as khtml.

Google has picked up on this last as the basis for its rendering engine and thrown in a completely new javascript engine. Further, it has rearchitected the whole browser platform for more robust performance.

Who will this work for? Well, I think anybody depending on a web service like Salesforce or 37Signals or Google. Early adopter technogeeks (like you) will also go for it. People in enterprise silos (zdnet's main audience) will not because they don't like disruption.

All in all, chrome adoption will take a while.

I'm surprised they did not debut with a mac option. Generally a younger crowd that adopts macs.