Profit Masters

Hi Folks… Randy here..

I just downloaded the beta of “Google Chrome”. I’ve been playing with it for a while and I like it a LOT! It has many strong points that fix problems that I’ve found in the Firefox browser from Mozilla. Some of these being the incompatibility with certain secure site that “required” the IE browser to work properly or at all. It does seem to display web page graphics like Firefox. This is a little disconcerting to me, since I try to write my own views. Since the IE browser is still the gold standard (although this may change with Google Chrome) I set my graphic placements so they’ll look the way I want them using IE. Firefox, and now Google Chrome, tend to offset my vertical spacing just enough to make my logos and headers slightly off vertically in relation to IE. This isn’t a major problem. I can adjust the layouts to produce consistant views.

What I do like is the bookmark bar at the top. I also like the fact that when you open a new tab, you get to pick from web sites you visit frequently, tabs you closed recently, web sites you’ve saved for some reason, and your favorite search engines. I don’t know about you, but there are certain sites I visit daily. This keeps me from searching my bookmarks each time I want to open a new site. I know, I’m lazy. But what the heck. Why reinvent the wheel?

Let’s talk about tabs. I can reorder my tabs! To change the order of the tabs displayed, simply click the tab you wish to relocate and drag it to its new location. How sweet is that. I don’t know how many times I wished I could move my IE tabs. Now how about this…You can move tabs to either a brand new tab or another open window.

1. To move a tab into a new window, simply click and drag the desired tab out of the browser window. If successful, you see a thumbnail of the tab that you are moving.
2. To move it to a different window, drag the tab from its original window to the top tab bar in its destination window. The tab should pop in automatically.

I got the last blurb right from Google Chromes Help Center, which I have found to be MOST useful!

Now let’s talk about the Address Bar. I doubles as a search box. Google Chrome also remembers sites you’ve visited before and makes suggestions. How cool is that! Well, OK, maybe not so cool since we’ve gotten used to search bars, etc. It is a neat feature. So is the ability to stop a web site from loading. Because Google Chrome is so speedy, another great feature, all you have to do is to click the “X” at the end of the bar. Usually this is a “right arrow” icon but when a page starts loading it turns into the “X”. Just click on it and the browser stops loading that site. Creating book marks is as simple as clicking the “star” icon just to the left of the site address. Easy as pie.

If your web site is misbehaving, you can whip out the Task Manager (Ctrl+Esc is the keyboard shortcut) and close down that tab without having to kill the browser. The Task Manager will also give you usage stats on the pages or tabs you have open. The “stats for nerds” link in the bottom left hand corner will even show you memory usage of other browsers you might have open. I like that.

There are tons of other goodies in this browser. I know I titled this post “Google Chrome – Pros & Cons” but all in all I’d have to say that there are more “Pros” than “Cons“. My advice is to wander on over to http://www.google.com/chrome and grab the download. Try it for yourself. Maybe we’ll talk about the Developer and Webmaster goodies later.