This Post Brought To You By Google Chrome

…well, if you haven’t figured it out already, I’m writing this post from the new Google browser, Google Chrome. I’ve only been using it for six hours or so, but my impressions so far have been extremely positive.

I hate the name Google Chrome, but it does make sense (for those of you not in on the joke, the chrome is the visible interface in an application). Google has done some very novel things with the Chrome interface, the most noticeable of which is the new location of the tabs. They’re now positioned above the address bar, in the title bar. This may seem weird and inconvenient at first, but their place in the title bar means they take up less space that the browser window uses to display websites. It’s also very easy to get used to, and I had no problems switching back and forth between Chrome and Firefox.

There is also no status bar on the bottom of the screen, which frees up some more real estate for viewing websites. There is a small box that emerges when to tell the status of a loading page or when pop-ups are blocked, but these either go away on their own or are quickly dismissed. In the fashion of the Download Statusbar extension for Firefox, downloads are displayed on the bottom (a toolbar pops up to display recent downloads). Downloads can also be displayed in a tab, which is a nicer way of viewing them than in a separate window.

What’s under the hood isn’t immediately visible, but the user can tell something’s going on. The browser seems much faster than the current offerings by other companies; I say seemsbecause I don’t have actual information to prove this, but I would be willing to put money on it. In addition to its new Javascript engine, garbage collection, and multi-threaded rendering, it sports a task manager, so you can see how much memory each individual tab is using—or kill a tab if some buggy Javascript crashes it. This comes up in a new window (hopefully they’ll put it into a tab at some point) and you can also see more detailed chart of memory usage in a tab, although you can’t end processes from that tab.

If you liked the awesome bar in Firefox 3, you’ll love Google Chrome’s address bar. Not only will it show bookmarked sites in the results, but it features nonintrusive autocompletion—meaning that if you start typing the name of a site you visit and hit enter, it’ll take you to the site you visit most whose URL begins with what you’ve already typed (this is just one way that Google Chrome uses your history to make life easier). It will also allow you to search certain sites by hitting tab after typing their name, and this feature combines with the autocomplete feature. For example, if I want to search Wikipedia, by the time I’ve typed wi into the address bar, the browser’s decided that I may want to search Wikipedia and has offered to let me hit tab in order to do so. This works for other sites such as Amazon.com and Youtube.

The other really cool way that Google Chrome uses your history to make your life easier has to do with your tabs. The browser builds on Opera’s Speed Dial feature by showing your top 9 most-visited sites when you open a tab. The inability to customize which sites are displayed may seem like a minus to the feature, but you quickly discover that once you give it time to build a sufficiently large database of pages visited, it’s incredibly uesful. (For some reason the browser doesn’t use the imported history to do this).

The browser follows Google’s minimalist philosophy by not introducing unnecessary bloat; as a matter of fact, other than bookmarks, there isn’t much that the browser can do that I haven’t described here. It is integrated with Google Gears, and I was surprised that there isn’t more integration with other Google products. I would have expected something like a Google Checkout plugin for easy purchases online, or an integrated Google Chat plugin or something. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t seem as though plugins for the browser are available anywhere. In their comic announcing the browser, though, they clearly stated that users would be able to write for the browser, so hopefully this functionality will be taken advantage of sometime soon.

Finally, for those of you are who are worrying about another rendering engine to support, worry no more. Webkit runs under Google Chrome’s hood, so all the pages you spent hours prettying up for Safari will display just fine here.