I downloaded and test drove the newest entrant into the browser wars, Google Chrome. There is nothing chrome about it. Instead of the traditional gray chrome frame found in the IE and FF browsers, Chrome’s chrome is actually sky blue. At first glance, the browser interface appears lightweight, almost featherweight like it is missing features, pared down, and bare like the traditional Google search interface. The lightness in color of the top portion of the browser makes it appear like it is without a strong anchor like the traditional steel gray of the other browsers. The height of the top part of the browser window including tabs, address bar, and bookmarks bar is less than in Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox (FF) so more of your web page appears above the fold. In reality, you really only gain two to three lines. And if you hide the bookmarks bar, it’s even shorter.

The tabs are at the top of the browser window unlike IE and FF whose tabs are under the address and menu bars. The Chrome tabs are also hexagonal in shape versus the IE and FF ones which are rectangular. You can drag and reorder the tabs like in IE and FF, but unlike the others, drag a tab into the browser window to launch a new Chrome window. None of the traditional menu bars and navigation toolbars of six to seven pulldown menus for File, Edit, View, History, Bookmarks/Favorites, Tools, and Help are in Chrome. All of these features are consolidated into the ‘Control this page’ and ‘Customize and control’ pulldowns which appear at the top right. What is quite different and cool is that the address bar also doubles as the Google search and web history search bars.

The status bar doesn’t appear by default nor is it persistent; however, if you hover over a link, the status bar appears dynamically in the usual bottom left position.

The star to the right of the address bar in FF to bookmark pages is on the left in Chrome.

There is a thumbnail history view of sites most visited.

The ‘Find on this page’ option I like in FF, is again, not abundantly obvious but ‘Ctrl F’ or clicking on the ‘Control the current page’ icon renders a search flyout from the top of the browser. The search utility provides a count of the number of instances of your search query on the page, highlights the query results on the page in yellow, and makes the first instance of it orange.

It doesn’t show alternate text on images like FF; IE displays alt text. It also doesn’t make the text appear anti-aliased like newer versions of IE. I didn’t notice any huge improvements in speed in downloading web pages but it is supposed to be faster.

Overall, it is interesting and worth checking out. It will require some re-learning on the part of users but is kind of catchy.

Related Posts: Google Web Browser ‘Chrome’ Launched, Google To Launch New Web Browser Chrome Tomorrow