Chrome, Google’s Wonderful Browser.
September 16, 2010
Hey there avid readers, any? oO
1st program I want to share with you is one that I use very frequently, it’s Google’s very own browser:
Google Chrome
A beta browser that’s similar to Mozilla Firefox but takes a different, more crash proof approach to web browsing, plus it’s very customizable.
Minimalistic Design, Maximum Usability
One of the fastest browsers out there, I know the tests are funny, and even funnier, the parody, but it is true, due in part to being built around the WebKit engine, most progressive & up to date browser engine out there developed under GNU Public License, thus not one company has control over it’s development allowing it to be frequently updated with latest trends.
The opened platform also means anyone can develop for it taking the usability of this web browser years beyond of what Microsoft is able to do with Internet Explorer. Think of it as a continent full of people developing for the browser pushing it’s usability and extensibility, where as a browser like Internet Explorer is limited to what a room full of people can accomplish at Microsoft, not forgetting they have to keep to schedules, release dates, corporate maneuvers, and development cycles.
This brings up the usability, with extensions you can pretty much make this browser do anything you want, from controlling your music player, keeping track of your ebay bids, page editing, to even forcing pages to open up in internal Internet Explorer views, I mean, the possibilities are vast here.
The extension options are almost endless.
One of my all time favorite extensions for this browser is AdBlock (carried over from Mozilla’s Firefox) which checks a “blacklist” prior to it rendering your page and removes any reference to advertisement, this allows you to browse whatever page you may wish and never see any annoying flash/static advertisement ever again, just clean, pure pages with the much sought after information that we desire.
Not to mention the ability to change the type of blacklist per country, so if you’re in England for example, tracking cookies will display ads on your browsers from their local servers in england, a tailored Ad experience they call it. Someone once wrote, Ad’s were so yesterday, and if you’re one of those people that still uses a browser that displays Ad’s, you can’t imagine how good it is to never see Ad’s again.
Another fantastic feature of this browser is that it is designed around the familiar Windows© idea of Task Management.
If you ever used Microsoft Windows© you might be familiar with the Task Manager, a tool that keeps a track of all your running processes (programs), showing you how much memory/CPU time a program is using, allowing you to adjust it, or even close them if they act up.
The same idea is applied to Google Chrome, every tab, extensions, page you have loaded is a separate running process that does not impede on the rest, what this means for you is that its hard to get the browser to crash, I will illustrate why. Say you have your web-mail open and you’re composing a letter to someone, you need to check something on another page thus you open a new tab, now if you were using Internet Explorer, if that second page/tab had some type of a bad implementation of a flash ad on it, this could cause your entire browser to crash making you loose all the progress you’ve made on the email, or all the progress you’ve made while writing a blog post such as this one. By separating each one of these elements of the daily browser use into different process’ the browser safeguards you from loosing valuable time.
Another favorite feature of mine is the ease of search using this browser, instead of going to www.google.com you can simply put your search query into the address bar and hit enter, it will automatically use the search engine you set as your preferred one, and do a web search on it. Or this great extension called FastestChrome which will pop up a bubble with search options for selected text withing a webpage as showned below.
You can’t get usability like this in Internet Explorer, it’s just too restrictive of a browser, don’t forget this is just scatching the surface, I will update this post soon to show you more. (AKA this post will not expire, I will strive to keep it up to date as new features are introduces, or as I gain the desire to add them).
P.S. If anyone reads this and is interested in the know how, or wants some help, please feel free to get in touch with me and it will be my pleasure to help.
