None of the criticisms he quoted are directed at their work and the second one looks pretty much "wishing harm" to me...

I like the idea but hope that they do not use the current implementation. A moving "favicon" will add visual clutter.

Doesn't the compiler inline this kind of functions?

The article's claim is that the inheritance model in WebKit is too complex for the compiler to be able to inline it.

the extensive use of dynamic class inheritance prevents the compiler from efficiently inlining short functions as necessary

You can't easily inline _virtual_ functions.

MSVC with PGO will do it, by inserting a guard on the vtable pointer and inlining the most common implementation. But you still take the possible cache miss of reading the vtable pointer, of course. And the other commonly used compilers (clang and gcc) don't do anything like this, even with PGO.

IMHO, cloud print, the webui reimplementation of gui system toolkits (like the print preview dialog). There are some new features that make me a bit worried with the direction chrome is taking: the new NTP with a search box duplicating functionality already in the omnibar; the chrome app launcher (I want a browser, not a whole OS).