In just 100 days since its initial release, Google’s take on
Internet browsers, Google Chrome is loosing its Beta label. The Web search giant
released the 1.0.154.36 version of Google Chrome, which fixes a lot of bugs and
is more stable and faster.
Because the lack of a bookmark system management was one of most
underlined problems of Google Chrome, the new version offers a new, shiny
bookmark manager, thanks to which the users will be able to search, move and
organize their favorite pages.
But why Google needs a browsers of its own? The company line
is that today's Web browsers - Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox chief among
them - were built at a time when most of what people did on the Web were view
static Web pages. Now, Google says, folks want to do all sorts of things on the
Web: play games, balance their checkbooks, upload and watch elaborate
multimedia presentations, even compose documents or create spreadsheets. The
major Web browsers, Google's management and developers say, have been slow to
keep pace with what users are demanding of the Internet.
Google's answer to this was to create a brand new Web
browser built from the ground up using the latest technologies and
technological innovations. And the goal was to build this new browser as an
open source model, meaning that developers from around the world will have
access to the inner workings of the code so that add-ons, extensions, and
improvements can be made by the world-wide community of developers. Google
believes that with this platform, developers will be able to build the next
generation of Web applications.
Google Chrome’s elegant, minimalistic interface is designed
to give as much space as possible to the webpage itself, with many elements
such as the status bar and bookmark toolbar, which are present in IE and
Firefox being reduced to temporary pop-ups of sorts, and others removed
altogether, such as the menu bar.
Searching itself is accomplished in what in most browsers is
the Address bar, toward the very top of the browser window. Open the browser,
and your cursor is within the Search field by default. As you surf the
Internet, the browser "learns" which Web sites you frequent the most.
On subsequent openings of the browser, or when you return to the browser's main
screen (Alt-Home on the keyboard), you'll see thumbnails of your most
frequently visited sites. Web sites themselves thus become the equivalent of
desktop icons in Microsoft Windows.
Another noteworthy technical aspect is that each tab
launches its own process, in order to prevent the whole app crashing in case of
a malfunctioning website, in theory at least.
The settings, available through a button to the right of the
address box, are pretty bare-bones as of now, but do include everything that is
expected of a next-generation browser: a password manager, tab settings, popup
blocker, network settings etc.
The really cool thing about Google Chrome is that it handles
very well multiple tabs, while at the same time it doesn’t crash when one site
crashes. Furthermore, Google Chrome allows you to drag a tab onto the desktop,
which will create a new window for that tab.
