Welcome back for part 2 of our in-depth Google Chrome Review.  For this installment, we’ll be looking at setup and configuration of Google Chrome. If you missed part 1, click here to read it now.

Options

The Google Chrome “Options” panel is pretty simple, with only 3 tabs and a minimum of choices. Compared to IE’s 7 tabs with tons of options on each, or Firefox’s 7 preference sections + about:config, this is either blissful simplicity or a complete lack of functionality, depending on your perspective.

Basic

The basic options are, well, pretty basic.

The startup options let you choose between:

  • Opening the home page - This opens the the same page you get when creating a new tab, which features the summary of your nine most visited pages, your bookmark bar, your favorite search choices, and your recent bookmarks.
  • Restoring your previous session - This is my default choice.  It works pretty much like Firefox does under this setting, although the lack of a “you’re about to close 20 tabs, are you sure” is a bit annoying. This will bite me when I have two windows open with 20 tabs in each.. I’m sure of it.For anyone who doesn’t have Firefox set up this way, Firefox doesn’t normally give you the “you’re about to close XX tabs” message when set to save tabs from one session to the next.  However, it DOES give you the message if you have two windows open with multiple tabs and go to close the first of them, effectively destroying all of those tabs.  It’s a nice feature and something I’ve come to depend on during my tabfests.
  • Open the following pages - This seems useful for those that like the same pages all the time. But, I’ve had one collegue switch back to IE7 (I didn’t say he was a smart collegue!) because of the way this feature works.  Apparently he’d like “Home” to switch all of his first X tabs back to this configuration.  I didn’t even know this was something IE does, but it appears that’s the way he has it set up.

Home page options are pretty standard.

I guess it’s kind of cool that one of Google’s few choices is to change the default search. I’m not sure if that’s them not being evil or just trying to look like they’re not being evil, but I dig it.  The list of choices is pretty short though.

Of course they have the “default browser” choice. I appreciate that they didn’t bug me with this choice right away when I started up.

Minor Tweaks

Wow, what appears at first to be a pretty simple tab of the interface and not even worth talking about turns out to be a bit of a nightmare.

Seriously, when I saw this, I immediately did a search for “google chrome major security flaw.” It turns out one had already been reported related to Webkit, but I haven’t seen this particular problem mentioned.

If you haven’t checked out the “Show saved passwords” button yet, click it. Then, click one of your accounts and click the “Show password” button.  There it is, in all it’s plain text glory. Your password. For your super-psycho girlfriend to grab. While you go to the crapper. Yeah, that’s bad.

It’s funny, yesterday I was trying to figure out a keyboard shortcut for the “save password” button, but now I’m thinking I don’t need that button.  There doesn’t seem to be any way to turn off this functionality or password protect the option, which means you better be super-consistent about locking your computer with that psycho-chick around.  Seriously.

On this tab, you can also tweak the fonts and languages.  You might want to switch to Swahili so your passwords are harder to decipher.

Under the Hood

There really isn’t a lot here for what seems to be the “advanced” tab.

You can clear out auto-open filetype associations, but you can’t view what they are - it’s an all-or-nothing thing.

You can send all of your info to Google. Like they don’t already know you like cowboy midget porn.

You can change proxy settings (which just opens the windows internet control panel).

I have no clue whatsoever what the “Show suggestions for navigation erros” checkbox does. I turned it off and tried to make all the errors I could think of, but they just got routed to search and ended up finding me what I needed.

DNS pre-fetching looks pretty cool, and might be part of why Google Chrome feels fast. It basically does all of the DNS lookups as soon as possible after loading a page, so chances are a link will have it’s DNS cached by the time you click it. Although an “about:dns” only shows it being beneficial for 9 hostnames, while doing no good for another 109.  Still, that’s a nice little boost on those 9 domains.

The security stuff seems pretty standard and isn’t all that intersting, especially considering the browser is already giving away all of my passwords any time I walk away.

Extras

There are some cool extra commands hiding in the command line:

  • about: - basically the About box in HTML form, not so useful
  • about:dns - shows you the DNS pre-fetching success rate and some other stats.  Makes me feel smart to read.
  • about:plugins - info on all of your installed plugins
  • about:memory - not only shows the memory usage of Chrome in each tab it has open and process it is using, but it also shows you a comparison between Chrome’s memory usage and IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari if they’re open.
  • view-cache:[URL] - appears to be the browsers cache of URL … in hex.
  • view-source:[URL] - I don’t see myself using this shortcut too often (I usually load a page before wanting to see the source), but who knows.

Extensions

Zip. Zilch. Nada.

I need del.icio.us, soon please!

At least they used the word “currently.” :-)

 

 

That does it for part 2. Check back soon for part 3, where we get into the features and usage of the browser in detail.

<< Part 1

Technorati Tags: