Google Chrome Browser
Google has a cool new browser they call Chrome. It is currently in beta, as Google typically does, but it works very well. One of the big things Google did to make its Chrome browser awesome was to make each tab a separate process. I’ve always had trouble with both IE and FireFox because I work with 20 to 30 different browser windows open. Both of those browsers run all windows and tabs within the same process, and eventually wind up overloading the availability of the process. Also, one hung browser window crashed all of them.
Not so with Google’s Chrome browser. Now each tab or window runs in its own process. If a tab locks up, you only have to close that tab, not every browser window and tab that’s open. This is fantastic for me as I hate having to close and reopen everything.
They have changed the URL bar to make it friendlier and more functional. For instance, since I go to http://jacquelinemoody.com frequently, I type just the letter j and Chrome guesses that’s where I want to go. At that point, I can hit enter and I’m on my way.
Another really cool feature is paste and go. If you’ve copied a URL from somewhere and you want to put it in your address bar, when you right-click you get a choice of paste or paste and go. Since 99% of the time you are pasting it in the address bar because you want to go to the URL, it is quite handy.
One thing people have complained about is Google hijacking their 404 pages. If someone tries to hit a page on your site and you have the default 404 page, Google takes them to a window and offers these suggestions:
- Go to the homepage of the site
- Search the site using Google Search for the term you used at the end of the URL
- Search Google for the term you used at the end of the URL, with it prefilling the words it thinks you want.
Now that last search is not necessarily going to use your domain name. For instance, I have a domain with the word ticker in it. The Google search window changed the term from ticker to ticket. I assume it is a more popular term and the ads the end-user will see will pay higher.
I’m not very happy about Google’s apparent hi-jacking of 404 pages. They do check to see if the 404 page has more than 512 bytes. If so, then Google doesn’t hijack the page. This means if you’ve altered the 404 to something meaningful, Google doesn’t take your visitor away.
Because this is an initial release, there are things missing. One thing I was quite surprised at was that there was no Google bar. I am quite used to the tools on it and hope they have a new one out soon.
All-in-all, I give Google Chrome a big thumbs up!