Price: FREE
Official URL: www.google.com/chrome
Runs On: Windows Vista and XP SP2
Rating:

The latest ultra-easy and simple to use application released by Google is “Chrome”. A web browser. Suddenly even Firefox feels slow and bogged down, and Internet Explorer? Arcane in its clunkiness. 

Google Chrome is a simple, easy to use, uncluttered web browser that downloads and displays pages with an almost eerie instant quality. Ad unlike other browsers commonly available, I haven’t had a single page display incorrectly. 

FEATURES & INTERFACE

Chrome offers a wide range of features which are so tightly integrated into the interface that I can’t even discuss “features” separately from “interface”.

The most important features (and the ones that sold me) are: faster loading of pages, and no more freezing up or crashing on buggy sites. The rest is just extremely functional and attractive icing on the cake, and there’s a LOT of it! 

Tabbed Browsing: Most browsers today offer “tabbed browsing” where each new website becomes a tab and you can move from site to site or page to page by clicking through the tabs as if they’re tabbed folders in a filing cabinet. Chrome does not offer tabbed browsing, Chrome IS tabbed browsing. The entire browser is built with tabs in mind. Simply press the “+” sign next to your current tab to open a new tab, or press CTRL-T to create a new tab as you would in any other browser. Right-clicking on each tab opens a list of options. You can quickly reload a tab, open the contents of a tab into a new tab, close the tab, close all tabs but the one you right-clicked on, or close tabs to the right of the tab that you right-clicked on. You can also close tabs that were opened by a particular tab. This is great if you’re researching several things. Say you’re browsing the New York Times and you open up several articles in new tabs. Then you have your email loaded into another tab, and in yet another set of tabs you’re shopping for shoes. Say you become bored of the shoe search but you’ve got 5 tabs of shoes open. Just right-click on the original shoe-search tab and you can quickly get rid of that particular thread of thought. 

OmniBox: In other browsers this is called the “URL Box” or the “Go Box”. In Chrome this is called the “OmniBox” and for good reason. Omnipresent, omnipotent, omnidirectional. Omni, in Latin means “All”. A very apt name. 

You can use the Omnibox to type in URLs just like you do in any other web browser. It becomes a search engine for your browser history. (Find a great website about diapers? Type in “Diapers” and you’ll be able to quickly find it again.) Auto-Complete in the Omnibar is even more compelling. It auto-fills a drop-down list first with sites that you commonly visit, and then with relevant google search results. All without having to search, all real-time, all fast. Unlike other browsers the auto-complete function doesn’t try to bring you to a sub-page of a sub-page that you visited once three weeks ago. It is intelligent, fast, and very impressive. THEN there’s the search enhancement. Once you’ve visited a website with a supported search engine such as Amazon.. Simply type in amazon in the Omnibox and look over to the right- you’ll see “Press TAB to search Amazon.com”. Pressing the Tab key will now convert the Omnibox into an Amazon search engine. (Press the backspace key until the Amazon search engine disappears to get out of it, or simply close that particular tab and open up a new one.) 

Chrome Homepage: Another great new “Duh” advancement from the folks at Google… A homepage that actually speaks to what you commonly do in your browser. Here you will see large thumbnail views of your top 9 most visited sites. To the right of that you will see a search box for searching your browser history, a list of recent bookmarks that you have added, and a list of recently closed tabs. One really cool thing to note is that this is DYNAMIC. If you close another tab, this page refreshes without any action on your part. IT’S ALIVE! 

Toolbar: The “toolbar” is minimal. Back and forward buttons, a reload button, an “add to favorites” button, a “go to” button, a “tab and window” button, and a settings button. Below that is your bookmarks toolbar. It’s a wonderful relief from the clutter that makes up most browsers. And honestly, I haven’t lost a single thing that I actually used on a regular basis. 

Bookmarks Toolbar:  The bookmarks toolbar is functional enough that I don’t miss the always-open bookmarks sidebar that I frequently used in Firefox. You can create new folders with a right click, drag items into and out of the folders, and re-arrange things easily. You can display your bookmarks on the toolbar itself, or you can drag them into the “Other Bookmarks” folder off to the right. My favorite thing? Right-clicking a folder of bookmarks allows you to select “Open All” which will open every bookmark in that folder into its own tab. Yeah, other browsers have this function, but somehow in Chrome it’s more obvious and so it sees a lot more use. 

Privacy Mode: The “tab and window” button which looks like a printer page icon and which appears to the right of the Omnibox offers an “Incognito” option for privacy. In this window you can surf without leaving a record on your computer. No cookies, no saved data, no pages in the history. Great for you, not so great if your kids figure it out. Honestly, it’s been easy enough for the kid to figure out how to selectively delete history, but at least that took work. Consider upgrading to Windows Vista and making heavy use of the parental controls and logging. 

Popup Blocker: Ok, THIS is different. Popups happen and are blocked at the same time. That is, they don’t automatically load but they show up as a “blocked popup” icon at the bottom of the page. Unlike other popup blockers you don’t have to fiddle around to try to figure out how to allow a popup that you DO want, and you don’t have to click “Allow popups” and then reload the page half a dozen times to try to get the popup back. With Chrome you just click the blocked popup and drag it upwards. The popup will load and appear seamlessly as if it was always there. (But it wasn’t, so you don’t have to worry about security.) Developers will have to work really hard to find a way around this one. If they can. 

Sandbox & Security: A “sandbox” is a technical term that means that an application is allowed to run, but it’s not allowed to access your computer. It cannot write files, it cannot access your tax returns or other personal information, it can’t install anything. It’s “Sandboxed”. Secure. Chrome sandboxes each individual tab so that one site can’t snoop on what you’re doing on another site, and so that no website can snoop on what you’re doing on your computer. Niiiice! It’s a great way to defeat malware and spyware. This security does falter a bit when it comes to plugins since they operate outside of the browser code itself. So you still want to be careful! In addition to sandboxing, Chrome enhances your security by attempting to alert you when you’ve visited a site known to contain malware (malicious software), or websites that are practicing “phishing” where they imitate an official site in an attempt to steal your data. 

TECHNICAL DETAILS

This new open-source browser uses the “Webkit” rendering engine. Chrome and Gears, both technologies developed by Google are “Open Source” which means that other developers can take the code that Google has developed and integrate it into their own browsers. This is a great move on Google’s part as it will attract a lot of developers. It’s a great way of doing things that has proven to be far more effective than proprietary software which frequently goes a long time with unfixed bugs and security risks. Other popular Open Source applications are Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office. Perhaps you’ve heard of those? OK, that’s as deep into tech-land as I’m going to go. You’re not here to hear about the geeky depths of technology, afterall. There’s a million sites dedicated to that if that’s what you’re after. 

DOCUMENTATION 

So far the only documentation that exists is an online google book that discusses the browser’s technology. In traditional (or untraditional) Google style, this book is not writtten as a dry technical manual. Hardly. It’s actually a graphic novel that makes the whole topic oddly appealing. You can read it here: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome Warning: this “documentation” is a bit on the geeky side, it’s a “How this works, the guide for Programmers and Engineers” not “how to use this, the guide for the new computer user”. Browsing through it WILL give you a better idea of how to use the features, though. Feel free to skip around. 

BOTTOM LINE

Chrome is still a “Beta”, but it runs faster, renders faster, and behaves with far more stability than any other browser that I’ve used. If this is a beta I cannot wait to see what future revisions of Chrome bring to the table. I’m a fan. Big time. Chrome has added itself to my list of “Must Have” programs. Think it sounds cool but don’t want to lose your current bookmarks? It imports Favorites/Bookmarks, Search Engine settings, Saved passwords, and browsing history from Internet Explorer and Firefox (and most likely from other browsers as well).