Today, Google released their very own browser, called Google Chrome. It isn’t available yet for Mac and Linux, but I tried it out on my PC and it is smooth. Installing was painless and quick, and it imported my Firefox history in less than 3 seconds, which was very nice, since I usually rely on my history rather than bookmarks on my PC.
Chrome’s address bar is called the OmniBox, and so far I like it way more than Firefox’s AwesomeBar. If you just type in words, without www. or .com, it will automatically do a google search (or whatever your default search engine is) for whatever you typed. In addition, if you type the URL of a search engine (www.youtube.com, www.yahoo.com, etc), and press Tab, you can then type the search term in the address bar. This is extremely nice, as Chrome doesn’t support the bookmark keywords that I rely on for searches in Firefox.
Another nice touch in the OmniBox is that if it auto-completes your URL, the part you typed is slightly darker than the parts it added (you can see this in the screenshot below).
Another cool feature is the ability to make standalone applications of web pages. This puts in item on your Desktop (and/or the Start Menu and the Quicklaunch bar), which will open a separate browser window for that site when you launch it. The window has no address bar or navigation buttons, it’s just the page and scrollbar. This is designed specifically for web-based applications, allowing you to have a separate application specifically for, say, a gmail account. It shows up on the task bar as the site’s title, with its favicon, as opposed to that of Chrome.
The ‘incognito’ windows are very cool as well, with a darker, more mysterious theme. While browsing in incognito windows, you won’t leave any trail (no history, no caching, no cookies, nothing), much like the Private Browsing mode in Safari. While I’m sure I can’t think of any reason someone would want to browse the internet like this, I bet many people will find this feature very enticing.
I don’t really like the fact that more and more Windows applications are ditching menubars in favor for drop-down buttons (see Windows Media Player 11 and Internet Explorer 7, among others). This is really disorienting, because there’s no longer a central place to access menus that’s constant across all programs. This gives the user a scavenger hunt every time they install a new application to try to deduce where the menus are, instead of being able to simply enjoy the application.
Apart from that one detail, I really like most of Chrome. It really is much, much faster than Firefox, and very pretty. The shade of blue Google used for the Titlebar happens to be my favorite color, which is very easy on the eyes. As soon as this browser comes out for Mac, I’ll seriously consider replacing Firefox.