Google Chrome – a quick look.

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It's not often that you see me seated at a PC running windows but when Google Chrome was released that's the OS of choice. I had to test it and so far there are a few features I find of interest.

These featres are seen when looking at the Google Chrome most visited page. Here you can see the 9 most often visited sites as thumbnails. Drag those thumbnails up to the bar above and you've got bookmarks for quick access at a later time. This window also displays the search and recent bookmarks tab. So far so good.

As with firefox there is site guessing text that appears for suggested URL's and for those you may have visited. Type in your username and password and you've got the option to save the password once you're logged in. Very useful for those of us spending our time on a minimum of ten websites a day.

With the tabbing feature I was able to open at least fourty tabs at a time with one minor problem. There was no manner of telling which site was on which tab. As a result they may need to think about creating a list view of tabs, or even implement what we saw in versions of operat ten years ago, the option to resize tabs within the browser. It may be of value.

In the search and URL bar there's the star, click on it and you can bookmark a page, add the title you want. The usual shortcut keys do the same thing.

Click on the page tab at the right of the search bar and you've got one option of particular interest. "Create Application shortuct". Select this option and you're given thre options, Desktop, Start Menu and Quicklaunch bar. There, now you've got the app as a shortcut link, great for getting straight to the web application you want in one quick move. That may be for twitter, your blog, twitter or any other website you find of interest.

The final feature is the task manager. It allows you to see which websites are open and how many resources they're using. The three collumns are Memory, CPU and network. It allows you to understand which page is slowing down your system, or if you open several tabs at once which tab has finished loading.

Overall it's an interesting product and it's dissapointing that I had to test it on an older windows machine rather than my laptop but so far my opinion of the browser is not that bad. I'd like to see a tab counter implemented as well as a thumbnail view of all the currently opened tabs for quick selection of the site or page I want to see.