Another day, another browser to support

As a web designer, I spend about 10% of my time designing and building a web page to standards, and the other 90% making it work consistently in the various browsers. Public enemy #1 is Microsoft Internet Explorer. I'm writing HTML and CSS to support several different versions of IE, each with their own set of rules (quirks). Enter Firefox, the most standards-based browser of its time. Firefox has grown significantly in marketshare over the past few years, but at the same time, it has bloated. Now Apple's Safari is cross-platform, granted not a huge number of Windows users have flocked to it, but it still adds to the mix. Not to mention smaller-share browsers like Opera which also has it's own way of rendering pages. If only we could have just one more browser to support..hmm. anyone?
Google is throwing it's hat into the already-crowded but still heavily Internet-Explorer-leaning browser circus. Firefox has been unable to dethrown Microsoft, maybe Google can. Beginning tomorrow, Google is releasing a beta of its new browser, Chrome. Thankfully, it's based on Webkit, which is the same rendering engine Safari uses. So, standards compliance should be top of the list. The other interesting addition Google is making with Chrome is a multi-threaded approach to tabs. Everyone is used to tabs by now, but the way most browsers use it is still single-threaded. That means when one tab is performing some sort of operation, (executing a javascript for example) the other tabs have to wait their turn. If one of those tabs gets hung up, it could potentially tackle the whole application. Chrome allocates memory to each tab, so every tab is like it's own browser with it's own processes. Closing a tab frees up it's memory. It's a brilliant theory and I hope it works. If so, it will make browsing faster and more reliable (particularly when utilizing web-based applications, of which Google has many).
I'm somewhat hesitant to lend credence to anything that bolsters Google into an even bigger giant than it has already come, but I'm cautiously optimistic about Chrome. Then again, anything that gets someone to abandon Internet Explorer is OK in my book.