N Ideologics

If you haven’t already tried it, downloading and installing Google’s new Chrome browser would be a wise decision. The logo looks somewhat similar to the Pokéball from that old hit Pokémon.

Chrome marks a new era of browsing, for once we have a company thinking outside the box and actually designing a browser that meets the demands of the modern world.

When you open Google Chrome, the first thing you’ll notice is the somewhat blank page that loads with a heading ‘Most Visited’. The pages you visit most frequently appear in this section, giving you quick access to common tasks. Chrome maximises the viewing area for the webpages you browse. If there’s one thing that becomes frustrating in browsers like Internet Explorer and FireFox, it’s the mass of tools at the top of the screen. Google have taken the basic browsing tools and integrated them into a single toolbar, and anything else is accessible using a drop down menu.

Instead of having an address bar, and a search bar, you have an Omnibar. Type a web address and hit enter, and you’ll arrive at the website. Type anything else, and Chrome will use your favourite search engine for results relating to the terms you entered. Simple, but so effective.

Instead of having a row of tabs, Google have removed the title bar and integrated the tabs there instead. But these aren’t tabs in the traditional sense either, Chrome is one step ahead and actually allows you to drag a tab outside of the tab area and into its own window! Or you can drop a tab into the tab area of another window. It’s so versatile, it’s ridiculous that other browsers don’t have this kind of functionality. I never bothered to switch to FireFox from Internet Explorer, because it always seemed to me that it was just more of the same. In my opinion, most security flaws come down to the user’s competence. But Google Chrome actually has some different to offer.

Perhaps one of the most noticeable features Chrome has to offer is its speed. Click Chrome, and almost instantaneously you’re presented with a browser window, even when Chrome isn’t loaded. Chrome runs every page as a process in its own right, so if one browser page crashes or starts to hog the processor, other pages generally aren’t affected.

My favourite feature of Google Chrome though, is the handling of JavaScript. It’s a fact that websites have evolved, and client side scripting plays a big part in the web today. Unfortunately, the handling of client side scripting hasn’t evolved at the same pace. Chrome compiles JavaScripts and runs them in machine code, which makes the JavaScript a whopping eight times faster! If you use Facebook or other JavaScript intensive sites, you’ll notice the difference. Even on machines with beasts for processors, JavaScript can really bog down performance.

So if you haven’t already, I’d definitely recommend trying Google Chrome.