A touch of Chrome
Google's new browser, Chrome, is unusual in that, at first glance, it offers much less than its competitors. Because we've become used to broswer menus and toolbar icons over the past decade, their complete absence is unsettling. Where's my File, Edit, History, Favourites and Tools stuff? But Chrome has ditched them to allow the web pages themselves maximum screen space. Bravo! The next big browsing adjustment is the Omnibox . Chrome merges the address bar with the search box and the user types a search query in the same line where a site address is displayed. Less is more!
Then there's tabs. Just as we've gotten comfortable with tabbing web pages, along comes Chrome and we're back to the browser displaying a single page. The difference is that in Chrome each tab acts as a separate browser, and the Omnibox, the bookmarks bar, menus and toolbar icons are located inside the tab, instead of across the top of the window. Chrome's clever, by the way, in how it organizes related tabs. Say you open a new tab from a link in a page that's already open. Well, that tab then appears beside the originating page, instead of at the end of the row of tabs, as we've become used to with Firefox and Internet Explorer.
And it's fast. And it's easy peasy to install. TechCrunch is impressed. The arrival of Chrome must be very depressing news for the perennial complainers who claim that Google is just about out of ideas. Far from it. In fact, the scolds should be afraid, very afraid, because what we're seeing with Chrome is one more step on the search engine's long march to a web-based operating system that will play the dominant role in the global information market.
