I’ve been using Google Chrome for the past 30 minutes. For those of you who don’t know, Chrome is Google’s attempt to enter the Internet browser market aimed directly at competing with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It’s no secret that Google wants to bury Microsoft and this is another step towards that goal.
My initial impression – it’s very intuitive and does everything you would expect from a web browser. One of the nicest features is the combined address bar / search bar feature. There is no longer a separate box for the URL and another box for searching.
Chrome will actually learn your surfing habits. For example, if you’re like me and use Amazon a lot, you probably go to www.amazon.com and then click on the Amazon search bar and perform a search. Now, with gears, all you have to do is go into your address bar, type amazon (even partial will work), click the “TAB” key and Chrome has learnt from your past browsing experience that you want to do a search within Amazon. This speeds things up enormously!
The other neat feature I’ve found is the “New Tab” feature. When you start up a new tab, instead of giving you a blank screen like other browsers, it shows you your most commonly used bookmarks and screenshots of your most commonly visited webpages.
If you want to try out Chrome, it’s available at: