popcult

Of course at this stage it is PC only so I had to get onto a work computer to have a look. The blogosphere has already got most of the good bits covered, so I won’t rehash old news. But I will say it presents a new browser experience: not a completely new experience, but rather a better way of doing what you already do. A browser 1.5 if you will. It is a browser designed to be up-to-date with how we use the internet now. As Google says, “Google Chrome was built for today’s web and for the applications of tomorrow.”

The default home page (if you haven’t changed it) and new tab page is something like a very simplified iGoogle page. You can’t add your preferred webapps or anything, but it has standard features. For example it displays thumbnails of your most commonly visited websites for quick access. You can search your entire web history if you like. It also keeps a list of recent bookmarks and closed tabs.

I look forward to the day that the default home page and new tab page is as customisable as iGoogle.

One of the coolest things about Chrome is that Google have released it under the (very) open software licence, the BSD Licence. The Google Code page for Chrome is here. A bit of a slap in the face to the Free Software Foundation’s GPL (and so close to their birthday) but whatever.

It is true what they say, Chrome is very quick to load things. In my experience faster than any other browser.

X marks the spot

All in all bookmarking on Chrome is pretty good. There is a bookmark bar that appears on the default home page and new tab page. To add bookmarks press the ‘Star’ button. Once it is added whenever you view that page the Star will be have a yellow fill.

If you want it on all the time you need to set Chrome to ‘Always show bookmarks bar.’ You can do this one of three ways:

1. Via a right click on the bookmark menu on the default home page/new tab page;
2. Via the ‘Spanner’ drop down menu; or
3. By pressing ‘Control’ and ‘b’ on your keyboard.

The Search is Over

Like Firefox the address bar also acts like a Google search. Either type in the address for what you’re looking for or just use keywords. A drop down menu displays results from your web browsing history and bookmarks. If what you’re looking for isn’t in that list hit ‘Enter’ and you’ll be redirected to the search results in a Google search. Interestingly, Chrome lets you preference another search engine as the default.

A really cool feature of Chrome is the ability to create shortcuts to webapps which will open the app in its own window. This means you can create shortcuts to things like Google Calendar or Google Notebook and with a double click have the webapp open and ready to use.

The minimal design means you only see what you need to see. Unlike other browsers which often have a permanent status bar, the equivalent in Chrome only pops up when it is needed: while pages are loading or when you hover over a link it pops up the links location.

Similarly, the ‘Download bar’ appears only when you’re downloading stuff. When something begins downloading the ‘Download icon’ appears and directs your vision to the download bar along the bottom of the window where the time remaining till complete is displayed. Once it has finished the item becomes a button. Click on it and it opens the file. Click on the ‘Down arrow’ drop down menu and you are given options including ‘Find in folder’ for locating where the file downloaded to.

At the far right hand end of the ‘Download bar’ is the ‘Show all downloads’ link which takes you to the ‘Downloads’ page which provides you with a chronological list of downloads. At the top you can search your download list by keywords. It would be great to see the ‘Downloads’ page able to be aggregated by other parameters. Maybe alphabetically by file name, by file size, alphabetically by file source?

Another niffty feature is that a tab indicates that you’ve downloaded something by displaying a little blue arrow next to the ‘Execute’ button. A helpful little reminder.

Like Internet Explorer’s private browsing mode, Chrome has an incognito mode. When you go incognito this handy explanation is displayed:

And just so you know you’re incognito there is a shady little character in the top left corner wearing a hat, sunglasses and a trench coat. Get your shady browsing on!!

A few other things

• The layout is very sleek and minimal.
• It does take a little getting used to not having your usual drop down menus (‘File’, ‘Edit’, ‘View’ etc). All the kinds of things you used to do with these menus are now hidden in other places in the browser. My advice, if you don’t already know a lot of the standard keyboard shortcuts, get to know them. 
• If you want the ‘Home’ button you have to turn it on in the ‘Basic’ tab in ‘Options’. Find ‘Options’ in the ‘Spanner’ drop down menu.

There’s always a but

The Big One: It isn’t available on MAC!

My only other real complaint is that for a Google product it is not very well integrated with existing Google features. Here’s some examples:

Bookmarking
Anything that you add to your bookmarks with the ‘Star’ button should automatically be added to your Google Bookmarks. Also adding folders to the bookmark bar and the ‘Other bookmarks’ drop down menu could be a little easier to find.

Unlike Safari and Firefox there is no automatic indication of an RSS feed on a page (that I have found anyway). When I did click on a feed link it just got a page of random code. It didn’t start my default RSS reader and ask me if I wanted to subscribe to the feed. It should as a default open Google Reader in a new tab and ask if you want to subscribe to the feed in Reader.

How great would it be if Chrome popped up a notification that you’ve received a new email in your Gmail account? Or what about a reminder that an event in your Google Calendar was coming up? Or even an accept or reject pop up when someone invited you to a Google Calendar event?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you were viewing a page, saw an event or something that was interesting and simply by highlighting and right clicking you could choose an ‘Add to Google Calendar’ option which would automatically read the information and try to match it to dates and times (like Apple Mail does with iCal and Address Book). Likewise, imagine if you could add people to your ‘Contacts’ in Gmail in a similar way.

I know it is early days yet, but come on Google, none of this is radical ideas!