It has been almost six months since I last wrote about Google Chrome. In the meantime Google has launched two new products Wave and Buzz about which I will write in future posts.
So what has changed in the last six months? Chrome managed to convince me and is now my web browser of choice. Why? Easy. Chrome is fast, both to load the web browser and to render web pages. Memory consumption is reasonable. Tabs are treated as separate processes so no single tab can bring the whole browser down. In the last six months this only happened 3-5 times and I only had to kill that particular tab.
Compare this to having Firefox crash on you in a huge ball of fire bringing down with it all your open tabs. Guess that is what they mean by fire in Firefox, rather than because it is fast. It seems that judging a web browser by its name is not a bad idea at all. Take Google Chrome. Just like chrome it is polished, looks awesome, and does not rust, read slow down, with time. Well I know chrome does rust if it is not maintained properly, but you get my drift
Not to mention the awesome handling of downloads, with circular progress indicators, and a dedicated download manager page. The history page is another beauty with a detailed chronological breakdown of the pages you last visited. Tab dragging and dropping is another feature I really like and find useful. For instance, having two Chrome sessions running with multiple tabs open in each. One session is stuff related to project A the other session to project B. You accidentally open a tab for project B in session A. No worries. Just drag’n'drop it over to session B and you are done. Simple but useful.
Password management is integrated perfectly into Chrome. The only issue I had with it six months ago is that it did not manage to import the saved passwords from the SQLite database in which Firefox stores its settings. Thus, I had to enter them once to have Chrome offer to remember them. But if you have a little patience and give Chrome a try I am sure you will never look back.
