After I recently managed to ‘break’ Firefox (all sorts of things would occur upon opening a third tab) I decided that instead of fixing it, or attempting to, I would see what this Google Chrome malarky was all about.
Now Chrome fulfills the usual function and layout of other browsers (it’d be pointless if you couldn’t actually view the web!) but with some subtle differences.
Firstly the tabs are above the address bar, this makes it much easier to relate to which tab you are manipulating, the address bar is also the search bar making the top ‘ribbon’ less cluttered, and the progress bar at the bottom is only visable when its making progress – if you’re not doing anything it stops taking up your valauble screen space.
One of the most useful features is the page that displays upon opening a new tab. This action, completed by selecting the plus sign next to the existing tabs, displays a really useful history overview with thumbnails of your most visited sites – simply click the thumbnail & your whisked away to your desired site.
Also on this page, towards the bottom right, is a list of pages you recently closed the tabs for. So when you accidently close a tab you can open it or them right back up again (if you close the whole window there is a re-open all entry). Not only this but it also saves the pages history so you can re-open the page and navigate back through where you had been to get there! This function made me very happy when I presumed a link had opened in a new tab, read it, closed it, then realised it hadn’t and I’d closed the whole site.
Another tweak performed by Google that I like is the menu when you right click a link. Most browsers that I’ve used have ‘Open’ as the first option – if I wanted to open it I’d have left clicked! – but the Chrome makers realised this & took it away leaving ‘open in a new tab’ as the first option, this saves so much time and effort for me. But does confuse me when I revert to IE for work resulting in many new windows cluttering up my desktop.
But Chrome has an answer to this too! If you were to open multiple windows and want to condense them you simply click the tab and drag it into another tabs window, the old window disappears and you are left with one window with both your tabs sitting side by side. You can mix and match your tabs, separating and merging their windows and re-jigging their order to your hearts content but once you have the tabs where you want (or you were happy with them how they were) you get to the bit that makes me go Grr!
I have found this to be either very over sensitive or have a glitch. When I change tabs by clicking on the one I want & I then move my mouse down to interact with the page, too often for my liking it brings the tab down with it – GRR! This generally only takes a second or two but my page is more often than not now off the bottom of my screen and I have to spend another few seconds moving it or re-adding it back to its original window. It doesn’t take long but those few seconds become very frustrating when you are a heavy tab user like me.
I’m not sure how I would want this fixed as it is a useful feature, when I actually want to make use of it, but it definitely needs changing.
My last gripe before a suggestion for improvement is that when you close the last or only tab in a window the window goes away. Now maybe my expectations have only been set by other browsers but if I’m say, reading the news and I want to visit a page that I know is in my history on the new tab page I close my current tab (this is the only tab I have in the window) and the window goes away, my browser is closed and I’m left looking at my wallpaper (or what ever other junk I have open). I don’t want this, I want it to effectively close my tab and open a new one. Maybe this is too much to ask but I don’t expect it to completely go away unless I click the little red cross in the top right corner…
Enough of features I can’t use and onto one that doesn’t exist yet. I’d like to see an addition to the base page for a new tab, I’d like to be able to specify groups of tabs to open, if I’m going through my finances I want to bring up all the banking webpages I use, if I’m catching up with peoples activity I want Roundcube, Facebook, Twitter & Google Reader, etc. being able to select such a group & have Chrome open all the relevant pages would be a really handy feature.
All in all, other than the tab movement issue, I think Chrome is an improvement on other browsers in the usability stakes…although I’m yet to work out how to actually bookmark a page…
