I feel gansta when I pull my chrome
Today a new web browser joins the market Google Chrome, and Google Chrome is good. Even in Beta, Chrome is incredibly impressive. If it continues to improve this may become the web designers go to browser.
What makes Chrome impressive? It is from Google; over the years Google has released some pretty impressive pieces of software such as Google Earth, Google Maps, Gmail and my favorite Google Analytics. Google Chrome appears to be no exception to the quality of Google products.
The visual design of Chrome is very minimal, keeping all the focus on the content of the web. Tabs are tiny and at the top of the screen, each tab is easy closed with a button that can be clicked from any frame. If you want to open a new tab just click Ctrl + T or a plus button to the right of the last tab.
What happens when you open a new tab? In Firefox nothing happens, in Internet Explorer an explanation of what tabs are. In Chrome you get thumbnails of your most visited sites and a list of recent bookmarks all with their respective favicons. Chrome also gives you a list of recently closed tabs, this is Ajax driven. If you have opened a new tab, then a second tab, went to a web page in the second tab and then closed it; the page you just closed would be listed in the previous tab. That is pretty cool if you ask me.
Of course the new thing with browsers is having search bars built in to the browser that uses your favorite search engine. Chrome does not have this, no extra search bar; it doesn't need it. You can search right from the address bar; type what you want hit enter and it does a Google search. Can you change the search engine? No, but hey it's a Google Browser what do you expect.
How is the speed in Chrome? It's fast, very fast, very very fast. Chrome uses virtual machine to run JavaScript that speeds up the rendering. I have only used the counting method, nothing scientific but I would estimate that Chrome renders pages between 2 to 4 times fast than FireFox.
Finally Chrome is open source, meaning anyone can pick it apart and make their products better, which is great. It is also built on WebKit which if I remember correctly powers Safari and will power the future Google mobile browser, Android.
I'm sure there are more new features in Chrome that I haven't found yet but the overall opinion is that Chrome is going to be great. However I don't think it is all sunshine, the biggest issue with Chrome is that it will probably take people away from standards based browsers and not IE. FireFox users and Safari users tend to be early adopters of new technology and will probably jump on the Chrome bandwagon. IE users tend to be behind the times, after all they waited 6 years for a new browser. Hopefully because it is from Google it can convert IE users, helping to make the web a better place.