Chrome

In case you have been living under a rock, Internet-wise that is, Google released a beta of their new web browser called Chrome.

I’ve been playing with it, and my official review is that I love it.  Its fast, and when a web page does lock up for some reason being able to kill just that one page without killing all my web pages is really nice.  Of course, being a beta, it still has flaws.  There is no integration with many of Google’s other tools (I’m a big user of Google Bookmarks, and while I can use the web page I would prefer to have my bookmarks available in browser), and various plug-ins don’t function (if you use any Cold Fusion web sites that make use of the database table grid tool thing, it doesn’t work).  But I am sure many of those will come in time.

However, playing with chrome introduced me to another thing which had previously been available but I have never used and that is using a single link to read my RSS feeds from my Google Reader.  I have subscriptions to 87 RSS Feeds, and its only growing.  Now, up in my bookmark bar in Chrome, I have a link that says “Next»” and when I click it, my browser navigates to the next unread RSS entry, or rather to the page of that RSS entry.  Now, when I find myself with a few minutes to spare between work items, I just click the Next link and start making my way through my RSS feeds one article at a time.  It really is quite nice.

Another really nice feature is the adaptive search engine capabilities.  Essentially, any website that uses a search where the search terms are in the URL (not passed as session or cookie values), Chrome will parse the URL and add it as a search engine.  When you start typing in a URL and you have enough characters to correctly identify the page (i.e. – it shows as the first option to select in the suggestions under where you are typing), hit Tab.  This will change the URL bar into a Search Bar for the selected web site.  Enter in your search terms and hit enter and Chrome will submit the search as if you had gone to the site and entered your terms into their search field.

And it works with any web site as long as you have performed one search on it.  If you have Chrome, search for something on my blog.  Anything.  Now, go back to the URL, type in “weblog” (or whatever you need to type to make my web site the first suggested option) and hit Tab.  Now type in a search term and hit enter.  You should get back a page of search results.  This kind of thing is fairly nifty as long as you have searched the site before.  Like, if I know that Scott over at BrokenToys.org has written about Hello Kitty before and I want to find it, I would just type in “bro”, hit Tab, then type “Hello Kitty” and press enter.  Bam.  Search results!

Overall, I’m really looking forward to more improvements being made to Chrome.  They have a great start going, and I am optomistic that it can only get better from here.