Last week I tweeted that I had installed Google Chrome and was really really falling in love with it. A few off my tweeps replied to me to ask why. I can't very well explain it all in 140 character bits, so I decided to blog about it a bit.
I have always been a big, huge, giant, enormous fan of Firefox. I have often pushed and teased until I got someone to switch from IE to FF. Now I may do the same with Chrome. But for those of you reading this, you may want to know that I'm basing most of my comparison and feature love off of my already beloved FF.
The Good
It's fast. Really fast. We have a small Acer Aspire One that our family uses primarily for web surfing on the go, and we have always used FF for the surfing. Unfortunately, when you open a new page, the mouse cursor freezes while the page loads. You can't just skip down and read while you wait for the photos to load. You're losing precious seconds while you wait for the cursor to come back. The other tricks like the space bar, arrow keys. and Pg Up/Pg Dwn buttons are also useless. Chrome loads pages lightening fast and that's one huge plus.
Simple, slim, and sleek. The design is really minimal, as you can see if you visit the Chrome site and watch any of the videos. Some may not like this, but I do. Less is more in my opinion. Especially when you're trying to read big web pages on tiny monitors.
There are tons of other features that I can mention here (like the one box for everything), but mostly I think you should check it out for yourself. If not by installing it, then watch the videos.
The last thing I wanted to point out - and have been trying to point out to my husband so we can use Chrome for our children - is the Application shortcut feature. Basically you have one or two clicks to turn any page into a short cut on your desktop.
Let's say you do this for Google Docs.
When you double click the desktop application, it launches a new window without any tabs, address bar, or other buttons. This gives you (or your child) a distraction free web application that looks very much like a desktop application.
I see this beneficial for webmail/gmail, google docs, and some online games like Runescape where you'd want to run it full screen.
The Bad
My favorite add-on for FF is Xmarks which will sync bookmarks across multiple computers. This is great if you have one computer for work, another for play, etc. I often bookmark homeschool sites, then need them when I'm at another computer. Right now Chrome can't sync like this. However, I've heard that they will be doing this soon through Google Bookmarks, so theres there.
Anyway, for me Chrome is perfect for 99% of what I'm doing online. Give it a shot!
