Will Google Chrome be gold?
Posted by Jacque on September 2nd, 2008
Today Google officially announced the launch of a new, built-from-scratch web browser called Google Chrome at an 11:00 a.m. (PDT) conference, with the Beta download available at noon (actually a little earlier).
Stealth news and screenshots of the product previewed yesterday at a number of sites such as Official Google Blog, Google Blogoscoped, and CrunchBase.
Chrome has a well-developed help center so I won’t belabor the “how-tos,” but I will note some of the interesting features.
- The interface is so clean as to be notably plain at this point. Not a bad thing.
- One box serves as both address bar and search box. It works.
- Tabs are a main feature, thankfully having the Ctrl+T shortcut for creating a new one.
- You can import your bookmarks, search history and so forth from Firefox and/or Internet Explorer. Makes for instant usability.
- Claims to be very fast and so it seems, and to recover from crashes in a friendly way.
- An “incognito” mode that lets you browse the web in complete privacy because it doesn’t record any of your activity
- Open source, and built with a new JavaScript engine from the ground up for speed
I downloaded Chrome and have been playing around with it, liking some features, missing some others, but generally finding it worth my time to explore. Microsoft recently released Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8 (download).
