Chrome != chrome
If you had asked me what “chrome” meant to me 10 hours ago, I would have probably answered something similar to this
[wikipedia] Mozilla-programmers sometimes refer to XUL applications running locally as “chrome“
Personally, when I was told that Google’s new browser is going to be called “Chrome”, I was expecting it to be yet-another-avatar-of-firefox-but-ugly (flock anyone 
). But was I in for a surprise. There are some extremely intuitive and nifty features that I loved about “chrome”.. d’oh.. “Chrome”.
1. The animated icon on the tab beside the page title is a beauty. It rotates anti-clockwise when Chrome’s sending a request and clockwise when it is receiving data. I just have one word to describe that.. BRILLIANT! Not only have they got rid of the ugly status messages on the status bar (status bar.. where?), they have increased the display area substantially.
2. As said above, getting rid of the status bar was a brave move. Not only have they distributed the job performed by the status bar all over the place (might I add, to its relevant locations on screen), they have made a transparent pop-up at the bottom of the screen for highlighting URLs etc.
3. When searching on a page, if a match happens at more than one place, Chrome highlights the matched line on the vertical scroll bar. This so resembles IntelliJ IDEA man! As a matter of fact, these features were confined to IDEs before, but Chrome derived it and I’m happy that they did so.
4. A quick load and rendering is always a pleasure to have!
All in all, Google Chrome has only managed to replace Opera on my machine as I don’t see Chrome yet beating lightning-bolt Safari or feature-rich Firefox. (No comments about IE. I like to think that my Windows came without IE)
Filed under: /etc, Google | 2 Comments
I can’t use Chrome at work because of the info that appears in the new tabs. Even though the frequently visited websites are visited before I start work, during lunch and after I clock out, there they are for all to see. It would create a potentially embarrassing situation if ALL of the most visited sites were not work related.
Even worse… Most of my most frequently visited websites revolve around politics and religion. I have extreme views on both subjects and I try my best to keep that sort of thing private.
I know that I can open a new “incognito” window but then all the cookies get erased and it’s a pain to log into everything, every time, etc…
It would be my very strong preference to disable the personal info presented on the new tabs. The personal info display makes Chrome more of a professional hazard than anything.
@hawaiitestblog
The decision to disable the “Most Visited” pane on new tabs is subjective. Chrome doesn’t yet come with a facility to launch with different profiles, and once that’s implemented, each user could have his/her own section.
In the mean time, if Chrome is going be used on public machines, then I definitely agree with you that Google should provide some level of configurability.
You could actually place feature-requests for Google Chrome here.