Having sort of "grown up" as a web dev with the way things are now (IE in the lead, followed by a smaller, but significant firefox, a few safari users and this thing no one ever heard of called opera) it's been easy to be cynical about progress in the browser world.

What's so exciting about Chrome is that it validates what had seemed like (to me at least) a lot of wishful thinking about "javascript applications" and really full-featured, browser-based UIs.

Plus, having such a big user of bleeding-edge javascript techniques driving the innovation can't be a bad thing.