Digitally Refreshing

Download now: http://www.google.com/chrome

Google have built a browser and they’ve called it Chrome. You can read the Google Chrome press release for all the technical and aspirational commentary. Read on for my take …

Things I like:

Tabs
Yep, all browsers have tabs – thanks to Opera (at least that’s where I first saw it years ago) but Google have done it better. Without getting into the complexities let me just say that now a tab can crash horribly and it won’t crash your whole browser session – fantastic!

Tear off tabs
What a pleasure, use this all the time – maybe because I have 2 screens in front of me and like to reference two pages at the same time. For example, I can see Chrome now whilst I write this – I don’t have to ctrl+tab constantly.

Most-visited thumbs on new, blank tab
A great interpretation of what Opera have been doing for ages. Last time I looked/updated which was several months ago I had to set up my favourites manually in Opera, which I did – but I lost interest quickly. Google Chrome does it for me, handy little thumbnails of my favourite sites laid out nicely for me.

A Private mode
Great for when you’re gift shopping for someone else who has access to the browser in your household. No more sifting through your history to delete that one ‘give-away’ website. Just launch the special private surfing window (it’s not a tab) and surf away.

It’s faster – by far
Check out these stats to see how quickly Google Chrome runs JavaScript.

There are things I need when I browse, such as Web Developer Tool Bar made popular by Firefox and Drag and Drop Attachments – but I expect these will come in time. I also wish that I could double click in the empty tab space to launch a new browser – but now that’s like clicking on the window itself.

So, I like Google Chrome (love it really because it will force M$ to build a better browser or knock it out of the market all together)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 3:50 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.