Google Chrome: a new web browser for Windows
Since Google released its open source web browser a little over a week ago, I’ve been using it regularly on my Windows desktop. My standard browser on Windows is usually Firefox, although I did try using Safari for a while. But now I think Chrome has taken its place. Here’s why.
The first thing one notices when running Chrome on a slower PC like mine is that it launches much faster than any other browser. It’s never more than two seconds from the time I double-click the icon on the desktop till the cursor’s blinking in the so-called “Omnibar”, ready to go. That brings me to the second point.
The idea of combining the address bar and the search box is ingenious. To be fair, I believe the ability to search from the address bar has been a feature of Internet Explorer since version 6 or earlier. But it was poorly implemented and, as far as I can remember, it only worked with MSN Search. With Chrome, Google has done it right. As you start typing, the browser offers you results from your history, bookmarks, and Google.com, and puts them in a drop-down menu that doesn’t get in your way, as Safari’s auto-complete always seems to. This, put together with the default speed-dial start page that seems to have been borrowed from Opera, makes Chrome very usable and the user (me!) more efficient. It gets you where you want to go. Quickly.
It’s worth noting that this feature is also one of things about Chrome that’s raised privacy concerns, since a lot of what one types into the Omnibar is sent to Google. Entering text into the Omnibar is equivalent to doing a search on Google.com.
Its extremely bare-bones and non-intrusive UI is another thing that makes it appealing to me. If you look at the amount of space a browser takes up on the screen, you’ll see that from the top down there’s the title bar, the menu bar, the toolbar/address bar, the bookmarks bar, the tab bar, and the status bar at the bottom. In addition to those, one might install a third-party toolbar (Facebook, Google, mininova, etc.). Which doesn’t leave enough room for the content itself! Chrome has taken back some of that UI space. It has done away with the title bar by moving the tab bar to the top. The status bar doesn’t take up as much horizontal space and only appears when you need it (while hovering over a link, for example). And as with IE 7, the menu bar is gone.
John C. Dvorak, one of the hosts of the This Week in Tech podcast, mentioned on last week’s episode of the show that a number of pages didn’t load properly in Chrome for him. I can’t say I’ve experienced the same. The only site that is glitchy and unresponsive for me in Chrome is the ‘new’ Facebook.
Another much talked about feature has been Chrome’s Incognito mode. It’s almost exactly like Safari’s Private Browsing setting. Basically, everything you do in an Incognito window is not stored on your computer. That is, no cookies are saved and the pages you visit aren’t added to the browser’s history.
Download google chrome : http://www.google.com/chrome
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