I’ve been using it a little, and it lives up to the hype. It looks great, and its very user-friendly. Pages load faster and generally don’t hang on anything as they load. I expect there will always be some kind of threat in using any kind of browser on sites with malicious content, but Chrome was designed with that in mind.
There’s also a great Scott McCloud-drawn online comic explaining how it works, and what steps Google has taken to decrease security threats. You can read it here: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html
I’m sure the bugs will be popping up for the next few months—that’s the whole point of the Beta release, really—I think it’ll soon be giving Firefox a run for its money. I doubt Internet Explorer followers will give their Microsoft-approved browser up so easily, but if the security “jail” they’ve created works as well as they’re claiming it does, even that could change.
That said, I’ve spent a fair amount of time building websites recently, and Chrome is all but useless for that. Since it’s so much more advanced than Firefox 3 or I.E. 7, some things that wouldn’t normally work due to bad markup actually work fine in Chrome. That’s great for Chrome users, but awful for anyone who visits one of those sites in Firefox and can’t get the page to load right because something is wrong with the javascript.
