The Johnson Blog

Oh boy, here they come.

I just downloaded the Google Chrome Beta to take a quick glance at things.  In typical Google fashion, the UI is refreshingly sparse. See below for my very quick walkthrough.

The tabs are slim and the UI is devoid of toolbars:

At first glance you don’t see a status bar at the bottom, but it’s still there.  It just auto-hides when nothing is being displayed to leave more room for the webpage.  When it is visible, it isn’t obtrusive:

The visual history and “most visited” page you get when you open a new/blank tab is a nice idea, I like it:

I right clicked on the taskbar button, and noticed a Task Manager item.  Clicking brings up an interesting little window showing memory usage for the various tabs and plugins:

Hmm, I got curious what happened when I clicked End Process on the Flash plugin.  So I clicked it, and the page hosting it turned into this:

That’s pretty cool, it won’t bring the whole browser down. Nice.

Finally, the address bar doubles as a search bar.  If you aren’t typing a web address it’ll end up using your default search provider, and if you have selected Google it does the auto-suggest as you type.

I looked at the http traffic it’s generating, and sure enough, every second or two as you’re typing in the search/address bar everything you’re typing there is being sent to Google. Hah! And people were worried about Google Analytics tracking the sites you visited, they can now track sites you’re merely thinking about visiting!

Yeah, that bugs me a bit.  Time to put Chrome away.

Edit: In all fairness, I just looked around and found a checkbox to turn off using a “suggestion service” for search terms and URLs.  It’s just a checkbox, no way to pick a google-alternative though (are there any?).