I think one of the greatest improvements of Chrome over Firefox or any other browser for that matter is it’s JavaScript engine. I think the fact that they made it open source so firefox can adopt it shows how google just needed a browser out there that would run their apps efficiently, and isn’t necessarily trying to put Firefox out of business. Good competition is always helpful to keep spurring innovation along.

I’m sure protecting their business model to keep offering free services could also be a factor. I’m guessing not their biggest motivator as they could probably spend a lot less time and money figuring ways around ad-blocker than rewriting javascript from the ground up.

It sounds like Firefox has also revamped javascript. http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/09/03/new-firefox-javascript-engine-is-faster-than-chromes-v8

If that keeps firefox running just as smooth, then I’m sure they have nothing to worry about. Still it sure is nice to just kill the process of a misbehaving tab in Chrome rather than your whole browser falling to its knees. Separate processes for each tab, genius.

I don’t think Google would want to come with plugins like Ad-Block etc which would hide ads and hence hit Google’s bottom line.

Your history is important…if you clear it then you lose ALL of your cookies and saved information which makes your browsing experience more than just a static web 1.0 use case.

Your browsing experience is supposed to carry over from one session to the next. For example, if you clear your history then you’ll never be able to find old web pages that were useful without bookmarking everything (thats dumb). Any website that keeps track of user settings in cookies also gets wiped.