Firefox is not rock solid! Far, far from it.
Chrome's big thing is each process is its own executable. Notice: if you open up 3 tabs, there will be (I think) 4 chrome.exe's when you check Task Manager.
So when one tab scrums up, the rest of them are fine, and that one tab gets an unhappy face (try it - delete one of the chrome.exe's while running multiple tabs).
It's probably what we can expect to see in the future. I think IE8 does something similar, but not as robust. By the way, I think chrome is supposed to be more resource intensive than Firefox. It's a browser model for the future - so not all unexpected.
So chrome will hopefully lend a stability that Firefox doesn't have.
Now, with regards to all the browsers people are naming, one key difference is the rendering engine they use to display web pages.
Microsoft uses its own rendering engine.
So does Opera. Opera's has historically been one of if not the most standards compliant rendering engines out there. It was the first to pass Acid2.
Firefox, Netscape 6+, Mozilla Browser, and a bunch of others use the Gecko rendering engine.
Google Chrome uses the Webkit rendering engine, shared by Konqueror and Safari. Also very standards compliant. To date, I believe only Opera and Webkit pass the Acid2 test to date. Webkit has also raced ahead of Opera to pass the Acid3 test (these are tests for CSS compliance).
I think this is a concept browser, mostly. It'll certainly have an impact on the browser market, but of course it's not a complete product. I wonder where Google will go with it.
One thing is that Google is not your typical software company with a stable product cycle, so don't hold your breath for its "final release version." This is the release. For example, is Google Mail out of beta yet? Nope...
[This message has been edited by RMS29 (edited 09-08-2008 @ 02:13 AM).]