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Chrome 2 Adds Some Serious Speed and a lot of New Features

May 22, 2009 By James View Comments

I’ve had Google Chrome installed since it was still in beta way back in November (it rolled out of Beta in November as well).

From the beginning I’ve said that my two favorite things about Chrome are it’s speed and it’s clean, friendly interface. Even in beta Chrome was by far one of the fastest browsers I had ever used and now, with the release of Chrome 2, it’s even faster and more stable.

One of my early complaints with Chrome was its weak contextual menu. If you’re a blogger and you use Firefox, you’re probably very familiar with the shortcuts your contextual menu provides you. While Chrome is still not quite up to FF standards their new contextual menu is beefed up quite a bit and definitely has many more of the basic necessities.

Surprisingly, one of the most requested changes that Google received about Chrome, and which has actually been addressed in Chrome 2, is the ability to hide the thumbnails on your tabs page. Now you can have all the joy of being able to quickly navigate to some of your most visited sites without all the embarrassment of friends coworkers being able to see that said site is The Hills Gossip Fan Club Blog.

Chrome 2 also features form autofill. This one is pretty much self-explanatory.

Chrome 2 may well work its way up to becoming my default surfing/blogging browser of choice but when it comes to taking care of business, Chrome can’t hold a candle to FF with Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug. Those are pretty much essential tools when I’m working on a project, which is practically daily. It’ll be interesting to see if Google even tries to make any headway in that area of FF.

All in all, if you’re not dependent on a lot of Firefox add-ons for your job, Chrome may well be a light, fast and intuitive option for your browsing needs.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: browsers, firefox, google, google chrome, Web Apps

Trick Out Your Firefox with some Chrome Sweetness

February 1, 2009 By James View Comments

While Google Chrome is a pretty sweet browser and it’s speed is hard to beat, Firefox still feels like home and has a lot more blogger friendly tools either built in or available as add-ons. So, for now I’ll be sticking with Firefox as my primary browser and occasionally toying with Chrome.

Fortunately the new Google Toolbar (BETA) for Firefox adds at least one nice tool from Chrome. The most visited thumbnail grid when opening up a new tab.

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If that’s not enough Chrome-like sweetness for you, you can head over and check out one of the Firefox Chrome themes to Google it up a bit more.

Filed Under: Tips Tagged With: firefox, google chrome, google toolbar, most visited new tab

Google Chrome is Out of Beta

December 11, 2008 By James View Comments

chromeThis has to be some sort of record for Google which usually keeps their products in a perpetual state of beta.  Gmail was released over four years ago and it still has the beta tag attached to it.  There may, however have been very good reason why Google decided to rush Chrome out of Beta.

Here’s the announcement put on the Google Chrome help blog:

We’ve heard a lot of feedback about product bugs and feature requests and have worked hard to prioritize work on them. We’re excited to announce that with today’s fifteenth release we are taking off the “beta” label! 

But why Google, why have you rushed Chrome out of beta?

Google Chrome is not out of beta because it’s ready, but because Google wants to sign some deals with computer manufacturers like Dell that will preinstall the browser. ” The Google’s open source browser has a number of eager customers, including OEMs who can’t offer the browser until it is in full release,” mentions TechCrunch. Even German’s Federal Office for Information Security said that Google’s browser is not for general use because it’s still in beta. If that’s price to increase the adoption, then Google didn’t have to do much: just pretend that Chrome is ready for prime-time.

That’s probably a pretty good assessment of why Chrome got pushed to 1.0 so fast.  Still, I’ve been using Chrome for a while and it’s lightening fast with a super clean interface and I’m definitely looking forward to see what improvements Google make to the browser now that it’s officially out of beta and into production.

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: browsers, google, google chrome

Google Chrome not Compatible with Google Toolbar

November 3, 2008 By James View Comments

As I’ve mentioned before I’ve started using Google Chrome as my default personal browser while at home.  Sometimes I slip up and go back to the warm comforts of FireFox but Chrome is so damn fast and clean it’s hard to put it down.  

I’ll admit Firefox is much more intuitive and allows me to blog much easier, but hopefully Chrome’s contextual menu will catch up to the curve set by FF.

I was going through some of my RSS feeds tonight when I saw a new post over at the Gmail Blog about some Google toolbar functionality.  Normally I hate toolbars with a passion, but Google toolbar is one I’ve been able to live with in the past and I was curious how it would work with Chrome.  Google Toolbar with Google Chrome?  It must be second only to sex I thought to myself.

Sadly, I was quickly given my comeuppance when I tried to install it and realized that toolbar and Chrome don’t play together at all, let alone nicely.

I’ve often heard that Google’s projects are very segmented which is why Gmail and Reader don’t coexist, even though they’re basically the same platform, but I have to admit I didn’t expect this.

I’m sure much of the functionality of Toolbar will be built into Chrome eventually if it isn’t already so it’s not a huge loss.  Besides, who really likes toolbars anyway?

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: firefox, google, google chrome, google toolbar