I spent a bit of time last night playing around with Chrome, the new browser from Google. The interface is nice and clean — a bit too clean, for those of us used to having everything laid out in a series of menu bars. The most obvious change is that the address bar and search bar are the same thing: just start typing and it gives you suggestions for both urls and search terms. It seems to have streamlined a few tasks — downloading is a bit easier, as is bookmarking pages. But it does not appear to support RSS feeds yet, which is a pain.
I spent a bit of time last night playing around with Chrome, the new browser from Google. The interface is nice and clean — a bit too clean, for those of us used to having everything laid out in a series of menu bars. The most obvious change is that the address bar and search bar are the same thing: just start typing and it gives you suggestions for both urls and search terms. It seems to have streamlined a few tasks — downloading is a bit easier, as is bookmarking pages. But it does not appear to support RSS feeds yet, which is a pain.
The major structural innovation is that each tab runs as its own process. Google is billing it as a an anti-crash device, but I think it goes further. Since you can drag each tab away from the browser and have it running as a separate process, eventually (I suspect) google expects that we will be running very rich apps in separate tabs which can be kept open, minimized, etc. on your desktop, even when not online. That is to say, they are setting the stage for the browser becoming the operating system.
Meanwhile, I’ll still be using firefox, if only because of RSS.
Anyone else gone Chrome?