Google Chrome, what's the big deal?
Thursday, September 4th 2008 @ 10:14 AM (not yet rated)
Have you heard about Google's new web browser 'Chrome' in the last 24 hours? For something that wasn't exactly blasted throughout the airwaves by Google with an 'official launch' (a comic book was made and this was leaked about a day or so early) it certainly has made an impact in the blogging world, as well as making it onto mainstream TV and radio.
Only available on Windows XP/Vista to begin with, I quickly downloaded it on my PC laptop to begin playing around with it and my first impressions of the browser is that it is definitely faster.
Chrome treats tabbed windows as separate processes and has a task manager that can be accessed by right clicking Chrome’s title bar. Similar to the task manager in Windows, it lets you see which processes are active (inside Chrome), and how much memory, CPU, and network resources they use.
It's also very easy to drag a tab out of Chrome into a separate window and you can drag a separate window back into tab bar. Nice.
There's the new 'Incognito' mode; click the control icon in the upper right corner of the browser and you’ll get the option to open a new tab, a new window, or a new incognito window. Incognito window will fire up without appearing in browser or search history, and it won’t leave cookies or any other traces of your activity, except files you’ve downloaded or bookmarks.
When you open up a new tab, there's a (not completely original) Intelligent Start page, that remembers and gives you a list of your 9 most visited pages, as well as a list of your most recent bookmarks in a list down the right hand side.
So where is this all leading? I think Google has a very cunning plan and I also notice that they seem to be very slowly (but surely) creating their own Social Network. It's actually already there; it's just not plainly obvious at this stage.
So, for all you Windows users out there, you can go to www.google.com/chrome to download this new browser. Feel free to give your impressions and make any comments below.
