Chrome, one year along

From what I've seen, it looks like Google's done a pretty lackluster job of promoting the Chrome browser amongst the general public. But of those precious few end-users who DO know what the heck Chrome is, many of them don't seem to care much.   Here's why I think it's worth caring about, from strictly user (as opposed to a geek -- or a market) perspective:

• If you run Windows, you probably find it slow.  (Windows 7 may help with this . . . at least initially.  Then we'll see.)  But Chrome is a free piece of software that will probably make some of your most frequent actions faster, all day. Window opening; web app performance; eating little RAM; and other factors should contribute to making the same amount of work faster, on the same machine.
• Opening a browser window -- how often do you do this at work? My frequency is going up and up. 5 times an hour? 10 times an hour? 20 sometimes? Might be 500 times a week. In IE, it takes many seconds to get a web page window loaded and ready to type in, even if you set your home page to blank (as I always, always do). And Firefox, sadly, has been getting heavy.  (Or perhaps it was like this all along, and Chrome is making me notice it.)  Opening a Chrome window just takes NO TIME -- it's more like a piece of the OS, like a file explorer window, but faster. It comes up NOW. And it goes away NOW. Once you get used to it, waiting for FireFox or IE to boot seems like a bother. You use the web more, because using the web suddenly gets cheaper. 
• I know an IT professional who, every time he wanted to use one of these newfangled "search engine" things, would open an IE window, then (with one finger) type "G-O-O-G-L-E-.-C-O-M" and press return. Then he would find the mouse pointer. Then he would use it to click inside the provided search box and begin typing a query.  Total time: 15 seconds?  (a few hundred times a week?  He did it this way for years, and still might.)  There's no need for this. There's no need, actually, to ever see the Google homepage itself at all, and it shocks me that folks still do.  Do not have a homepage!  Open a browser window (perhaps with a keyboard shortcut or by using Spotlight (command+space, then type the first few letters of the name of your browser) and just start typing what you want.  And you will get it.  Chrome is built around doing just this.  (And the other browsers will let you -- Firefox quite well.) 
• Web app performance . . . isn't just an overclocker fetish. Serious javascript-heavy apps are starting to appear in lots of places, not just in the GOOG domain (Wave is a BIG app), but in Apple's online apps (Sproutcore framework), Zoho, and many others. And these apps work better and come up faster in a good browser. Even embedded web apps (Flash/Flex/Silverlight/etc) may use javascript bridges. Blogs and forums are getting more and more javascripty. And with a fast Javascript engine, more features of (increasingly) more web pages just start to feel, subjectively, faster and more useful. You use it more, because it's cheaper (in terms of your time and attention). 
• For some objective measures: on a lame corporate laptop, I ran the Sunspider browser benchmark with a score under 1000ms in Chrome; around 3500ms in Firefox, and around 35000ms in IE7. (I get about 5000ms in IE8 on my VMWare Virtual Win XP box running on a Mac.) And in the beta channel version of Chrome, they just made Javascript about 20% faster again. 
• Windows and tabs are cheaper in Chrome, memory-wise, than in other browsers.
• And they free ALL their memory when they close. This is really important for end-users, though it's a geeky detail. Browser memory-creep is more and more of a problem since a given browser may be running, in one form or another, for many many hours, or even many days.  This is a result of the fact that we're using the web more.
• UI stuff is important to me, but I won't say too much about that here except:
• UI-wise, tabs will help us manage many windows as we begin to use the web for more and more things.  Chrome has a better way to do them, UI-wise. 
• The omnibar is one place for google searching, URL typing, and history searching.  I suspect that more and more end-users will start to rely this, once they realize it's there and what it's actually doing for them.
• Constant updates. Chrome's use of the clever google updater means almost continuous -- but INVISIBLE -- updates. The updates are very small because of Google's new binary-diff technology, and they are pushed out very frequently. This translates into safety and stability.  The browser just takes care of itself, which is a nice feeling for such an important application.
• Extensions: are coming. But it's funny; it turns out I can live without most of my Firefox extensions. One thing I like is to have bookmarks sync-ed among my browsers on any machine I use. But this is built into Chrome (though I'm not sure if this feature has been rolled out to all users yet).

A note about Safari: Safari on Windows is also really fast. But I just don't like it as much. The omnibar is not as good; the tab system is more old-fashioned; and it seems more quirky/non-compatible/crashy on Windows than on the Mac. It doesn't have Chrome's excellent memory management and memory partitioning between all tabs. But it's still a better option than IE for daily use.

Update: Play Nintendo in the browser.  Chrome: a very playable 45fps.  Safari: unplayable at 11fps . Firefox unplayable at about 8 fps.