Interesting Google Chrome Features

Google Chrome is now available for download.

Rumors have been floating around for a while about Google making its own web browser. Google Chrome is Google's entrant into the browser wars.

Features

Chrome boasts an impressive feature set. Google is known for their innovative applications such as Google Earth. Chrome is no different. Here are some of the main features of Chrome:

The homepage opens when you create a new tab or start the browser for the first time. It lists the most recently viewed pages, your bookmarks, as well as recently closed tabs.

Another interesting feature related to tabs is the ability to drag them out of their parent window. Simply drag the tab out of the browser to open it in a new window. You can drag tabs from window to window in the same fashion.

In Chrome, each tab runs another instance of the browser. If one tab becomes sluggish it will not affect the other tabs. You will no longer lose what you were working on if another site causes the browser to close. Sluggish processes can be ended before they become a problem.

Incognito can be activated with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+N. Websites loaded in an Incognito window do not store cookies and are not saved in the browser's history. To return to normal browsing, open another instance of Google Chrome.

Chrome's find feature works much like Firefox's except for one key addition. When you start searching, yellow lines appear on the scroll bar. A higher concentration of yellow means that the term appears more frequently on that part of the page.

Downloads have their own dedicated page in Chrome. New downloads are stored at the bottom of the current tab. Click "Show All Downloads…" to open the download manager.

Theme

When I first read about the tabs being at the very top I was slightly skeptical. You will get used to it quickly however. Chrome manages tabs in a different way. Instead of having arrows on the left and right sides of the tab bar, the tabs shrink to fit in whatever space they are given.

The blue and dark blue gradient might not be your cup of tea, but I am sure theme customization will be added in the future.

V8 JavaScript Engine

I felt that this feature deserved its own section because of its importance. Much of the web applications we use are powered by JavaScript. A handful of apps use it to emulate a desktop experience. While the language continues to evolve at a rapid pace, the engine that powers it has not.

Google's popular web mail service Gmail uses JS. One of the main reasons Google developed a new browser was to implement a JavaScript engine that would dramatically speed up JavaScript based applications. The speed boost is noticeable from the minute you start using Chrome. As the engine is tuned and refined, the advantages of Chrome will become apparent.

Conclusion

Google has packed some cool and useful features into Chrome for its first beta release. While it may not be a full browser right now, Chrome will soon be a serious competitor in the great struggle that is the browser wars.

For more information, visit the Chrome website at: http://www.google.com/chrome/