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Everything Google touches turns to Chrome By Adam Swimmer – Canada It's been about a month now since the launch of Cuil, the search engine that was supposed to take down Google, developed by ex-Google engineers. It fizzled out after a less than stellar launch. Now Google is trying to break into a different area of the Internet itself with its new browser – Chrome. And unlike Cuil, Chrome may, in fact, be a step in the right direction. For one, it's a good time to come out with a new browser, as the formerly sleek, efficient Mozilla Firefox has become somewhat of a bloated piece of software in version 3. And based on the betas, it's not clear if Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 will be any improvement of its previous stagnant iterations, which is what made many, myself included, switch to Firefox in the first place. Chrome, an open source browser, is currently is only available for Windows, but Google is supposedly working on Linux and Mac versions. Granted, the program probably isn't sophisticated enough for Linux users and the Mac version will likely be crap, because all browsers are crap on a Mac. And although it's probably "kewler" to switch to a browser, such as Flock anyway as it can use extensions like Firefox, for the casual Internet user, Chrome is a fine alternative. Even though, in many ways it is a less complex browser than some of its competitors, Chrome has some interesting features. Chrome presents a sort of minimalist look for the surfer. The tabs are at the top of the window in place of the title bar and the menu bar has been removed to allow more space for content. Frankly, I found this a little annoying. Although from IE7 up, the menu bar is hidden by default, you can make it reappear. Since almost all programs on any system have a menu bar and people expect it, it makes the interface a little more difficult to navigate with its absence. The default homepage and new tab page provides you image links back to sites you've recently visited, the latest sites you've bookmarked and even the last tabs you closed. (This last feature may not be quite as quick and useful as the undo close tab option in Firefox. Still, it's a nice touch.) Also, you can view the full history of your browser in list form. You can even search the history as if you were doing a regular Google search. And when you want to delete the history, you can call up the clear browsing data from the options, which is a one-stop temporary Internet files deletion tool, patterned after Firefox's clear private data tool. What's unique is you can specify the time frame of the data you want deleted. You can delete data from the day, the week, the last four weeks or everything. I'm honestly not sure how choosing time frames would ever be useful but someone out there might like it. If you want to be even more careful about your web trail, you can enter in Incognito mode, which allows you to surf without saving your web history anywhere. This, of course, is useful if you say do a lot of Internet banking or are searching for German Scheisse videos starring Cartman's mom. It's a great idea, but in practice it's a little cumbersome because you can't even tell where you've clicked during an Internet session as the links don't change colour to acknowledge you've clicked them. So if you're constantly going back to the same list of video galleries of sweaty, naked women doing unmentionable things to each other, you won't be able to keep track of what you've already watched and will be forced to watch the same performances over and over and over. Realistically, a better option would be the ability to set the browser to automatically clear the data when it's shut down, as Firefox already provides. What's more important is that Chrome is quite fast. I haven't seen as quick page loads since before Firefox reached version 1. The layout looks a bit off sometimes and it has a help page listing some its functionality issues with web content, such as Google Documents, oddly enough. Generally, though, pages render smoothly. And it uses less system resources than Firefox so it's less likely to interfere with other programs you have running. Also, the tabs work independently. So if some bad page stalls a tab in the browser, it theoretically will only crash that tab and not the whole program. You'd be able to keep surfing with the rest of the tabs. I haven't had a tab crash on me to test that claim out, but that in itself suggests Chrome is a relatively stable browser. The big complaint, however, is that Chrome isn't very customizable. If you are a Firefox user like myself who has a number of add-ons installed with it, you might have a hard time adjusting to not having them anymore. For example, you might miss your RSS feeds, adjusting the actions when you click on the tab or the ability to block and or control ads, flash and Javascript code. Also, it's really annoying to organize your bookmarks on Chrome as you can only make one change at a time. Still, Chrome should have a pretty bright future as it has a really strong brand name and is convenient to acquire. Just as IE gained dominance over Netscape simply by being bundled with Windows, most people can't really remember the Internet before Google – not even those of us who were online back then. It's the most popular search engine in the world and there's a link to Chrome right off of its homepage. Google is a powerhouse and really the only technology company in the world that has a chance of bitch slapping Microsoft into submission. And if Chrome is a success, it's possible the often talked about Google operating system may not be far behind. Of course, China's version would have restricted access privileges.

 

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