Why Chrome is Cool
I'm a little put off by the press reaction to Chrome so far. The articles I've read
seem to slate it as just another ho-hum browser with nothing really special about
it. Personally, I disagree with the lot of them and think it's an excellent browser
with one killer feature built in that not many people seem to have noticed. The
"Create Application Shortcuts..." option on the toolbar is immensely handy and does
exactly what it says on the tin - it turns a web site into an application. That
means you no longer need to waste screen real estate on having an address bar or
tab bar present when you're just looking at Google Mail or Google Reader and also
means you can put links on your desktop, start menu or quicklaunch to go straight
to them. Surely that's got to be the pivotal part of Google's OS independant web
apps approach. If you combine that with the equally press-scorned Google Gears,
all of a sudden you've got fully working applications that run on any OS that runs
Chrome, whether you're connected or not. Now put that on a mobile device and you've
probably brought it all together into one big succesful business strategy to deliver
advertising right into people's everyday lives.
That said, I actually think there's a lot of very nice touches to the browser -
the status bar that disappears when there's nothing to display (though it took a
few moments to realise it neatly pops out the way of the mouse when you hover),
the fact the tabs exist in the title bar space on Vista thus wasting less valuable
screen real estate, the general crash proof nature of it all considering it's a
beta and the name and shame process explorer that'll show you which plugin is destroying
your performance (*cough* *cough* - we're subtley looking in your direction Adobe...).
Anyway, that's just my take on it. Considering it's still in Beta, there's some
very sound design decisions been made that will help Google tie you to their services
and keep them in a position to serve you advertising for many years to come.