Impressive. Atleast till now.
Google announced their new open-source browser called ”Google Chrome” yesterday and even more interestingly, explained the concepts behind their browser technology in a simple comic book.
I downloaded Google Chrome today morning and it installed in a flash. And first time when I opened, it gave an option of importing settings and bookmarks from my firefox. (I am not sure if this is because firefox is my default browser, but should work for IE too.)
The first impression you get when you open the browser is .. neat!! No cluttered toolbars, no menu items. The status bar appears only during page loading. This greatly improves the screen real estate for the actual page display.
Then the “Omnibox” – combined url entry and search bar. Looks similar to firefox’s smart address bar, but with search feature and can also include site specific search.
About speed, the browser itself loaded fast, much faster than firefox. The pages seems to load faster than firefox, but didn’t test much to tell for sure. But other bloggers have done some tests and found it faster.
The tabs are the main component of this browser. Every tab has its own task. The tabs can be easily rearranged or moved into a separate window altogether.
Another nice feature is its own “Task Manager”, that lists each process and the memory taken. You can end any process in the list. You can access task manager by keyboard shortcut Shift+Esc.
The password saving looks similar to firefox. The download bar at the bottom shows the active downloads. The omnibox has domain name highlighting, which is good for finding phishing sites.
Another important feature is to turn any web-page into a webapp, which will get its own desktop shortcut and a separate window, with no browser control, similar to what Mozilla Prism does.
It also comes with a Incognito mode or private mode, where no trace of browsing history is left.
There is no home page, but the default page shows frequently accessed sites.
The browser comes with Gears and flash plugins. But I am missing my firefox plugins like adblock and greasemonkey.
All in all, a good experience. I like it. Will I start using it instead of my firefox, not sure.
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