Ok, it’s time for part 3 of our in-depth Google Chrome Review.
If you haven’t had a chance to read the first two parts yet, check them out:
[ Part 1 ] [ Part 2 ]
After nearly a week putting Google Chrome through its paces, it’s definitely growing on us here at Google Chrome Review. It’s been floating in and out of default browser status as I try to get my work done, and will probably stay in love/hate status until a couple of things are cleared up. It has several killer features and a couple of painful omissions. Read on for the best and worst of Google Chrome.
Tabs
Tabs are nothing new in the browser game, but Google has managed to add a couple of interesting features that improve the tab interface in some subtle but exciting ways.
First, in Google Chrome the tab has become the top-level interface element. Tabs are no longer subservient to the address bar and the other toolbars. This isn’t all that big of a deal in and of itself, but it does enable what I think is one of the coolest new features of Chrome, and one of two features that will keep Chrome in the race to be my default browser.
Anyone who has been moving to using web apps and tabbed browsing has surely run into this sort of scenario. You have some banking transactions open in one tab, and a Google Docs spreadsheet open in another, and you want to quickly make a couple of entries in your spreadsheet using values from the bank statement.
In Firefox or IE, this evoked one of two scenarios:
- a whole lot of switching back and forth between tabs while trying to remember numbers or cutting and pasting things
- or, a painful combination of keystrokes or mouse movements to move one of the tabs to a new window so you could look at them side-by-side. In Firefox, this was something along the lines of Alt-D, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-N, Alt-D, Ctrl-V, Enter, Alt-Tab, Ctrl-W - not exactly user-friendly.
With Google Chrome, this problem is solved.
You see, in Google Chrome each tab is a full independent citizen of the windowing world. You can just grab one, drag it out, and it instantly creates a new instance browser instance. Or drag it back in and it will settle in to the tab bar. You can also drag a tab easily from one browser instance to another.
Address / Search Bar
This is the other “killer feature” in Google Chrome. What seems at first a “so what” feature (IE and FF both have some fashion of interpreting non-URL text typed into the address bar, right?) turns out to be rather liberating for the user.
It’s also (in this author’s opinion) the key reason Google wants Chrome in the hands of users.
I’ve seen a lot of speculation on Google’s reasons for making a browser of their own. Much of it is centered around changes to cookie handling in Internet Explorer 8. I agree that this can give Google more control over some of those factors. But, I think what they’ve done with Chrome is both more subtle and more brilliant than that.
Chrome’s “Omnibar” effectively replaces the entire domain name system with Google Search.
You see, what Google has done here is encourage the most basic of novice user behaviors - typing gibberish into the address bar. And, they’ve managed to make that same behavior attractive to even power-users. I’ve found that after nearly a week of using Chrome for at least half of my browsing activity, I’m getting less and less concerned about remembering URLs or choosing to search. I can just punch up the browser bar, type whatever comes to mind, and be pretty comfortable I’ll get to it in a click or two.
Sure, users can change their default search engine, but most won’t. And the more that don’t, the more search engine results pages Google gets to show. And this means more ads.
Well done, Google.
Downloads
Like most of the interface elements in Chrome, the entire download interface is very minimalist and very clean.
There is no separate download pop-up like you see in most browsers.
When you click a download link, your download begins immediately and drops to a wide bar at the bottom of the browser, where you can watch the status of the download as it’s happening.
As you download more files, each new file goes to the far left of this bar, sliding the remaining files to the right. When you run out of room on the bar, files drop off the right side (this download status bar also seems to show a maximum of four files, even if you have room for it to show more).
This bar is specific to the particular tab you have open, so you can see your most recent downloads on a per-tab basis.
To view all of your current and past downloads, you can click the “Show all downloads” link on the right side of the page. This opens a new browser tab that shows all of your downloads sorted from most recent and grouped by date. It’s again an incredibly clean interface.
I really like the lack of a download confirmation. There’s no “you are about to download a file - are you sure?!” type message. There is still a normal confirmation when you go to open or run a downloaded file, so I don’t think this will be too much of a security issue for novice users.
Adaptive Homepage
I talked about this in some detail in Part 1 of this review, so I won’t go into too much detail here.
After a week, my view hasn’t change on it too much. I don’t think I’ll really use it much, even though it looks pretty nice.
The “Most Visited” thumbnails move around too much to be as quick for me as typing the first couple of letters of my favorite sites’ addresses - generally I’m going to know the URL for my most visited sites.
Similarly, the “searches” feature is cool, but it’s much easier for me to type “ebay ” and my search term than to get to this page and click a search box. I do think this will be a very popular feature though for some users, and the discoverability of the “ebay ” shortcut could use some work.
The part of this page that might eventually become useful for me is the “Recently Bookmarked” section. But, I need the delicious integration that I mentioned in Part 1 for this to work for me.
That’s all for part 3 of our in-depth Google Chrome review. In part 4 we’ll continue looking at features of Google Chrome, including history, app mode, and keyboard shortcuts. Stay tuned.
