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| Thursday, September 4, 2008 01:44 PM |
| (Last updated on Tuesday, September 9, 2008 09:14 AM) | | Chrome |
 by Fëanor |
Have you tried Google's new browser yet? I installed it on our laptop last night and did some blogging in it, and after about ten minutes I was ready to declare it my new favorite browser. I've been using it heavily at work today, too, and although I'm slightly less enthusiastic about it now, I still think it's a pretty excellent program, especially considering it's still in beta.
I'm not used to jumping from one browser to another willy-nilly. In fact, I used Internet Explorer pretty much exclusively ever since I got on the internet, up until a couple of months ago, when I finally got fed up with IE's constant crashing (especially when using Find in Page - trust Microsoft to make a function as simple as finding text in a document so complex that it crashes the entire program one in three times you use it) and switched over to Firefox. Since then, I've mostly enjoyed using Firefox, but it does have some small quirks that annoy me (mostly having to do with its behavior in response to script functions on certain pages that I use a lot), so I was willing to give Chrome a try. I was very excited to discover that Chrome has the same stripped-down kind of interface as Firefox, but none of those annoying quirks (read: blogging in Movable Type and on my own site is a smoother and more pleasant experience). It uses screen space very efficiently, giving the web page itself as much of the square footage as possible by dispensing with the title bar, menu bar, and even the status bar (the latter being replaced with a small message box that pops up only when needed on top of the web page in the bottom corner). Using one entry field for both search and URL input was a smart move, as was the cool "Paste and Go" feature in that field. Of course, Chrome doesn't work perfectly with everything on the internet yet (it is a brand new browser, after all); it does have some of its own annoying quirks (why dispense with so many of the other toolbars and then require the bookmark toolbar to be on the screen for me to be able to access my bookmarks at all?); and it's running a bit slow, especially when switching tabs. But the latter could have more to do with my computer, and all the other stuff I'm running on it, than with Chrome itself.
The point is, I give it a big thumbs up, and it's going to be my browser from now until it does something I can't live with - or I find another, better browser.
UPDATE:
Another thing I like about Chrome: the look, the design, the logo. The ability to open an incognito window, that does not record your browsing history and so forth, is pretty sweet, too. And there are some great tools for developers, like javascript debugging and the inspect element function, not to mention the task manager.
Other things I dislike about Chrome: one of my favorite features on the newest versions of the other big browsers is the ability to automatically clear your cache, your history, and other such files whenever you close the browser. I can't fathom why Chrome is lacking this functionality. |
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