Which is ironic, because it really is just a webkit view, not even running the latest js engine that native Safari has access to. In short, it's not very good, this Chrome.
Predictive prefetching makes sure Chrome already has the page data before you finish typing. It can still beat Safari with tricks like this.
Chrome Sync syncs your profile (credentials, tabs, bookmarks, omnibox typing model, etc.) across all your devices.
The user interface for managing tabs is also very slick.
Auto-update is gimped by the app store approval process, but at least you know that the Chrome team takes security very seriously and will take the minimum possible time to patch security flaws.
Those are some things that I would want over Mobile Safari.
As a website owner, I really hate that 'feature', it really screws up the exit rate in my site stats (I don't run ads on my sites.)
https://developers.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/pagevisibil...
This is only for prerendering. I think joshuahedlund is right about prefetching.
Chrome also does prerendering in some cases, which runs JS, fetches stylesheets, etc. The user may or may not ever see the result, of course.
But most security flaws are in the renderer, which comes from the OS. The Chrome team has no ability to do security updates for that copy of WebKit.
Frankly, I'm surprised they were willing to brand this wrapper as "Chrome", given that (and the more general issue that it's not the Chrome WebKit and is slower / less featureful / etc.).
This really is a killer feature, but it needs some tweaking. I do not want iChrome to autofill the same urls it does on my laptop. Let the mobile version default to mobile sites, and the desktop version default to full sites.
There is much more to a browser than the rendering engine.
It often feels faster than Safari (no matter how much people complain it being THREE TIMES slower than Safari because it doesn’t have JIT), incognito mode is much better as I don’t have to go to Settings every tim, passwords sync, omnibox.
The only big issue is that you cannot set it as default.
Chrome works slower and that's a fact. Its keyboard is custom, but inferior to Mobile Safari by far. Its syncing options are superior, but all in all you cannot say it's better than Mobile Safari. Unfortunately, you cannot say Mobile Safari is better either... But not being able to set Chrome as default effectively renders it useless.