Google Chrome
The new browser offering from Google was just launched today and its name is Chrome. Well, not so much a browser as a browser-emulated OS-type thingey. I won’t link to all the places it’s popping up on the web, since Google has. I haven’t used it much, but I will offer a few very small opinions to start.
It’s hard to imagine switching from Firefox since I have so many plug-ins installed, helping it make me more productive. Having said that, Chrome is smokin’ fast. Particularly, once you’ve loaded a site, Google gears caches the page and speeds up subsequent loads. I don’t use IE, but even compared to Firefox and Safari, everything loads very quickly. As I write this post from Chrome, it’s got the nice form textarea enhancement of Safari that allows me to resize my writing space on the fly – something Firefox has yet to enable.
The minimalist design really jazzes me, too. You might be able to tell from this journal … I love whitespace. The tabs load right up top with the address bar and bookmark toolbar just below, something Google calls the Omni Box. Beyond that, it’s all browsing space. A small (presumably) AJAX indicator appears at the bottom showing you URIs as they load or link URLs, but that’s it. I’ve always found the lack of status bar in Safari unnerving, so Chrome seems to hit the sweetspot of working space maximization, with enough cues to help users understand what’s going on.
User tools are compacted into two menus at top right, while page loading controls (back, forward, reload) appear at top left to each side of the address bar. The layering of tabs, address bar and bookmark toolbar just feels good. Other than a user-specified homepage, the default loads your most recent history as boxes (in kind of a storyboard layout), with a full history list available with one click.
Downloading and privacy look pretty good, too. It allows you to drag downloads to the bottom of the page and decide what to do. No download directories here. Plus, an incognito window will help you hide information about …. that gift for your loved one 
I have yet to explore some of the obvious integration with various Google tools, but as an avid gmail, calendar and reader user, I’m sure there will be many benefits. For a more solid rundown of features, ReadWriteWeb is doing some crowdtesting of the app and I plan to take a better read-through shortly.
The big, and I mean big, drawback so far? I can only use this at work, which I’m not likely to much, because it’s only available for Windows at this point. I hope it’s only a matter of time until I can test it at home in my preferred Mac environment.
I’m sure I’ll discover more when I can actually use it where I want.
September 3rd, 2008 at 1:27 am
Very light on resources love the browser
see review here
http://megawallpapers.info/?p=23
September 3rd, 2008 at 2:03 am
I haven’t noticed any big integration with google tools, however I love the application shortcuts… Here’s a comparison with Firefox: http://blog.gadodia.net/google-chrome-vs-mozilla-firefox/
July 15th, 2010 at 9:10 pm
[...] I wish Google Talk was more like Skype. It wouldn’t even have to offer IP telephony. If you use Gmail, then you can search Google Talk web chat transcripts in your inbox. That’s not the same as a self-contained chat tool that gives you a full feature set including full transcripts. Then again, the best tools are ones that do one thing really well. Talking and chatting are great with Skype and collaborative writing and publishing to a number of formats are great with Google Docs. You can make them work together pretty painlessly and that’s probably the best way to go. Google Chrome [...]