Google stirred up the browser wars again yesterday by releasing Google Chrome yesterday. Chrome is an open sourced browser. One of the biggest features it introduces is in terms of stability. Chrome keeps each tab in a “sandbox” so if something happens to crash a page or tab you only lose that one tab… not the entire browser. I’m sure I’m not the only one that’s been browsing with about 10 tabs open, all important enough to want to read but not quite important enough to bookmark, when all of a sudden firefox freezes up and you lose all of them.

One of the features I personally am looking forward to the most is the dynamic tabs feature. I’ve had a complaint with firefox for sometime about the inability to (natively) rearrange tabs or more importantly pull a tab out of the window it’s in so that page is now in it’s own window.

They have also tweaked downloading files a bit. When you click to download a file a progress bar shows up on the bottom of the screen. When the file is done downloading you can just drag it to where you want it to go. This makes it a lot easier to organize your downloads as it lets you put the file right where you want it from the browser window as opposed to having to hunt and search through a Downloads folder.

Like Internet Explorer 8 there is a privacy mode. This mode is lovingly referred to by many as “porn mode” because it doesn’t store any cookies or browsing history on the computer. Of course neither Google nor Microsoft admit to it – both say the mode is for leaving no trace when shopping for presents for a family member.

Google also has it’s own version of Firefox 3’s Awesome bar which it calls Omnibar. Omnibar one-ups Awesome bar by allowing you to search right from it as opposed to having two bars on top. And before you ask, you are able to easily change search engines away from google. In fact when you install Google Chrome it imports your settings from your default browser and this includes default search bar.

So what are my final thoughts? I don’t think Google Chrome is going to be a major challenger to Firefox or Internet Explorer right away. It’s still in beta (of course – it’s Google). Currently it gives a fast and slick alternative to internet explorer for people that don’t need the plugin ability that firefox offers.

Has anyone else used google chrome? Any complaints or raves?

Tags: browsers, Google, internet-explorer, rss-applied

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 7:15 am and is filed under Search Engine Visibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.