Google chrome changes your browsing habits

I've been using Google Chrome for a week now.  It's quite good, although if you've been using Firefox (as I have been), the improvements are mostly minor.  If you are using Internet Explorer, stop!

The major change with Chrome is not in Chrome at all. It's how it affects your work habits.  You don't need bookmarks anymore and can recall pages by simply remembering a word or two that was on the site.  This is akin to drastic change in email work habits that Gmail brought about: you don't need folders anymore; you can always do a text search.  This capability of full-text-search of past browsing history really shines when you are using the web for research. Unfortunately, Chrome is not available for Linux, so my use of it has mostly been for non-work-related stuff.

The other nice thing is that if you type in a bad link into the address bar, the returned page is not simply "404: Link not found".  Instead, you get a suggestion box, based on Google searches, that list URLs that you may have wanted.

The URL bar is not just for URLs.  It's also a search bar.

Since I use several computers, I export my bookmarks from Firefox on one computer and import them into Firefox in the other computers. But Chrome remembers my surfing history and automatically creates a homepage that carries my most frequent visited sites.  A sidebar has a recent history of visited sites.  I haven't had to use my imported bookmarks much.

And for those of you using Firefox, Chrome does import login-password information from the Mozilla cache, so you don't need to re-register or re-type your passwords anymore.

Best of all, Google Chrome does not display popups. Nada.  Firefox intelligently tries to determine which popups are ok.  Chrome puts all popups -- even popups you requested -- in a tab which is closed when you close the parent tab.  So unless you want to see a popup, you don't have to see it.

What about internet applications? Javascript is blazing fast. Speeding up Javascript applications like Gmail is the key reason that Google developed Chrome, and it shows.  Flash plays just fine -- no better and no worse than in Firefox.  To run Java applets, you need to download the latest update.

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