If you want to get the new Chrome features as soon as possible then you are in luck; Google has launched the Google Chrome Dev Channel. The Google Chrome Dev Channel will give you early access to features and fixes.

The Dev channel is useful for:
Web developers who want to test their sites or scripts with pre-release versions of Google Chrome
Testers who need to make sure they’re working with the latest bug fixes
Anyone who wants to help make Google Chrome better – your feedback helps us turn good new features into great features, and using the Dev channel is a simple way for anyone to help.

Dev channel releases are less stable than Beta channel releases. Expect the occasional “sad tab” or even browser crashes (if you turn on ‘Help make Google Chrome better..’ in Options, we’ll get the crash reports so we can fix the bugs).

Automatic updates of new Dev channel releases are published every 1-2 weeks

Get all the details and what you need to download here: http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

The first version has been posted. There are a bunch of fixes
Plugins
r1735 Fixes bugs with Silverlight plugin not displaying correctly (issues 248, 666)
r1859 Fix YouTube (and other Flash videos) halting if the time-advance slider is used.
r1958 Fixes a problem with Shockwave/Flash games not loading (issue 643)

Crashes
r1662 Fix occasional crash when trying to make Google Chrome the default browser (b/1355679)
r1708 Fix crash in history view when deleting a day of history (b/1358107)

More here: http://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/getting-involved/dev-channel/release-notes/release-notes-021521

So I got it installed at home on a windows XP machine. It installed really quickly but you have to close Firefox so it can import all the settings from that. I’m not even sure it asked me if it could do that. I’m actually writing this blogpost in chrome.

So it loads the pages really fast and it renders the pages mainly in one go. I think it loads those pieces from the same server in one go.

Most things work. Except for the checkbox. Somebody made a mistake and it renders the checkbox as a radiobutton but I’m sure they will get that fixed one day.

I don’t like the placement of the tabs, I probably got too used to FF and IE.

In these widescreen days, I would like to be able to have my bookmarks (or something else) pinned on the right or left side. It would save a click.

And Lessthandot is being shown pretty much how it should be.

It doesn’t yet have many plugins like FF, but I think that will be solved soon.

Looking at the sourcecode is a pleasure, compared to the other 2 big ones. It opens in a new tab and it has colorcoding

Another cool thing is the taskmanager.

It also has built in firebug called Javascript console ;-)

So I’m pretty happy with it, but it needs some more testing because I have already seen lots of bugs out there, but we have all been there ;-).

So try it and make it even better. This could be a Firefox killer.

I hope they get a redistributing version.