I decided, after downloading and fiddling with Google’s new browser this evening, that a pretty good test of its mettle would be to do some Entrecard dropping with it.

First, I should note that every site I went to rendered just fine. I’m sure that makes all the web designers in the world heave a big sigh of relief. The last thing anyone needed was another set of odd CSS hacks they needed to incorporate into their designs.

It was also fast. Although there’s no Linky-like feature in Chrome, and I had to individually middle-click each link to load it in a new tab, there was absolutely no delay or stuttering while I did so. All the new tabs loaded happily on the screen. Unlike Firefox, which has scrolling arrows when you get too many tabs, Chrome just makes the tabs smaller, so when you’ve got lots loaded, it looks like a goofy looking mountain range at the top of the screen.

The biggest thing I noticed was that, even while the last sites were still loading, there was no delay when clicking the widget. You clicked the word Drop, and the next instant the Thanks, or Awesome was there.

Just to make sure this wasn’t just caused by a superfast Entrecard server tonight, I dropped my last 50 cards in Firefox. There’s a 6-8 second period where the yellow bar goes black in Firefox when some of the tabs have not finished loading.

The other thing I noticed is that when a script on someone’s site causes major malfunctions, Firefox closes completely, while Chrome just crashes the tab and keeps everything else running normally.

Actually, it doesn’t crash the tab, it just makes it unhappy. You gotta love those Google guys. Even a crashed web page becomes cute.

Finally, the extra screen space with Chrome might have also sped up the process, since I could see more of the widgets above the fold.

Overall, I really like Chrome. I am just hoping to see lots of cool add-ons like Firefox has.