Google has done it again. They’ve brought out something mildly innocuous and managed to make a huge fuss over it. This time I have to say that they’ve gone a little over the top with it, however I suppose we’ll have to wait a few months to see if they’ve pulled it off.
I’ve been playing around with the browser for about a day now (well, as long as its been out basically) and I’m not sure what to make of it. After reading the chrome comic
Chrome Screenshot
(which I feel was just a rather dull marketing mistake, only to be read by bloggers with too much time on their hands), it seems that chrome’s main selling point is that it has an independant task for each tab. This is lovely, but they do seem to have got a bit over-excited about the concept.
Their arguement is that if something goes wrong in one of your tabs, rather than feeling the need to shoot the web designer for crashing your browser yet again, you can merely close that tab, and everything else will be fine, as it was working in an independant process. I can see the arguement here, in fact, it’s a really good idea. Unless you’re one of those people who must have 20 tabs open at once, it really is good. I haven’t yet managed to crash a tab in chrome yet, but the theory is great. (On a side-note, this also allows a feature that has been sorely missing in other browsers; the ability to create a new window out of a tab without refreshing the page).
My favourite feature in chrome is actually hardly talked about in the docunmentation at all, which is that chrome will give you a link to a suggested webpage if it can’t find the one you’ve asked it for. This is extremely useful if you happen to be bad at spelling. It can’t help you if your favourite blog/news feed has gone down, but no-one can do everything.
There is a little niggle however. I don’t know if it’s because I’m using a laptop touchpad, but the scroll is extremely fast, and only works going down the page. As scrolling is my main means of navigating, I find this rather annoying.
I installed the new Internet Explorer beta today as well, just because everyone has been comparing chrome to it, and it it, as I expected, pretty much the same as internet explorer 7. Except it doesn’t save cookies any more. To be fair to microsoft, this isn’t completely true, however it does set itself up in ‘protected mode’, by default (chrome has something called ‘incogneto mode’ which is quite similar to this). Basically, protected mode stops any cookies or well…. anything getting onto your computer whilst you’re browsing. I quite like being able to use cookies. They let me access my e-mail and talk to people on facebook. The only possible reason one might want to do something as severe as activating incogneto/protected mode would be if they were about to access some particularly dodgy webites. From what I can tell, the websites that are most likely to install things onto your computer are those hosting cracked versions of windows software. All protected mode means (certainly to me) is that it would now be easier to download cracked versions of office. Rather shooting themselves in the foot I feel.
IE8 also comes with a shiny feature called “suggested sites”. This is basically stumbleupon, except that it doesn’t work if you’ve deleted your browser history, (i.e. if you’re using protected mode) and you can’t choose what topics it gives you. I really like stumbleupon. It can lead you to some extremely pointless websites, but as it started me reading xkcd I can’t really complain. Although I do see it as rather nice that Microsoft is trying to bring these features to the technologically uninitiated, I think that most people with internet addictions severe enough to want stumbleupon already have it installed, and the rest of the web just wants the news and bebo.
There is, however one reason why I am unlikely to be converted from firefox to either of these browsers. They don’t quite show me anything I feel I need badly enough to leave all my plugins behind. I realise that it would ruin the speed of chrome (not to mention opening so many processes that your cpu explodes) and that IE8 runs slowly enough already (something that I am much less keen on), but firefox’s plugins, though not all nessescarily useful, make me happy, and that’s something that I am reluctant to leave behind.
Chrome is rather nice though.
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I think I will try to recommend this post to my friends and family, cuz it’s really helpful.