Non Tech Review of Google Chrome

In real life, my friends would describe me as an early adopter – I was the first of us to start using a Blackberry, the first with an iPod and I’m the one they all turn to for “techie” advice. But in the internet marketing world, it’s dawning on me that I’m pretty conservative, and that there is an awful lot of technology and software out there I haven’t even heard of, let alone adopted.

I have been a convert to IE7 for some time, and was delighted with tabbed browsing, when I came across an advert for Google Chrome. In the spirit of my new role as an internet entrepreneur I hit the download button and I have been using Chrome for a week.

And I love it! These are the key reasons:

• One box for search, or for entering URL’s. This is so easy – to find a taxi service in London, for example, I just type those words into the one box and the browser does the rest for me. This is a huge timesaver – before I had to go to favorites, click Google, then type the words – do this 100 times a day (and I do) and the saving is staggering.

• When you open a new tab, the sites you use the most are shown as thumbnails - just click the thumb to go to the site – brilliant!

• Tab drag and drop – you can drag a tab out of the main window and create a new one, or drag separate tabs into your main window, making managing your screen so much easier.

• When IE7 crashed (and it did too often) I lost all my tabs – with Chrome each tab is separately loaded, which means if one crashes, the others stay up.

• Incognito Mode – Not something I’d ever use of course, but if you should want to visit sites that a partner or child in the home wouldn’t approve of, Chrome has an incognito mode, which means those visits are not recorded in the browsing history.

Apart from all of the above, the other key factor I love is the speed – everything seems to load much faster than in IE7.

I’m sure there are drawbacks, but I haven’t found them yet – please let me know if you have found any via the comments.

If you want to download Chrome, you can do so free at the Google Chrome Download Page