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Google Chrome – nice…but needs a little extra sauce…

Googlechrome

I’ve been playing with the new Google Chrome web browser over the past few days and I’m impressed. It’s fast, clean and I really like the combo search and address box. It means you don’t have to differentiate between doing a web search or entering a URL, you just type in the required text and boom, the browser goes off and returns the right content. Very slick.

It desperately needs plugins though, because every Firefox user relies on at least one extension which they can’t do without. For me it’s Tab Mix Plus (I can’t do without automatic new tabs popping open), so I won’t be swapping browsers until I get the same functionality.

Gmailapp

One great feature though is the ability to create desktop icons for web apps. I’ve already got Gmail running as a standalone app on my desktop and it’s made me seriously think about moving away from the Thunderbird email client for the first time. The only problem is I’m not sure if I can put up with the clunky Gmail interface, as I’m really used to folders now (and date sorted messages). Ah well…I’ll play around a little more. Unfortunately Google Gears won’t install for me either, so I can’t check to see whether it’s possible to use the new Gmail offline yet. Rats.

Oh…and here’s the Open Source version, Chromium.

  On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff – the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go. Behind the scenes, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab working in isolation, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

1 Comment

  • Yeah, It’s a nice start but I keep trying to access “image zoom” and “screen grab”, and I always wind up back using Firefox.

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