Google Chrome's Smart Interface Innovations

Kevin Maney writes: I watched Google's unveiling of its Chrome browser, and some of the user interface updates will be welcome. Some highlights:

-- The design is clean and simple, like Google search. Chrome is built around the tabs, which can be grabbed and dragged anywhere, including pulling them out to open a new window.
 
-- Google got rid of multiple boxes at the top. Instead, one box now serves as address box and search box. It supposedly can figure out which you're doing. Of course, this is great for Google search -- will funnel every search request from a Chrome user right to Google.

-- When you open a new tab in Chrome, you don't get a blank page like you do in Firefox or IE. Chrome displays thumbnails of recent pages you've visited. Click and go right there.

-- This is brilliant: you can open an "incognito window." Anything you do inside that window will be invisible to the computer you're working on. No trace left. Helpful if you borrow someone's laptop to look at porn. Not that I'd ever do such a thing.

-- Google built this especially to better accommodate Web-based applications, like for instance Gmail and Google Docs. A feature of Chrome lets you open an app in a window that gets rid of a lot of the other browser functions and makes the app look more like a regular app like Word.

-- Chrome has a "task manager" type feature, which allows you to see which pages in your tabs are eating up resources, so you can close down individual sites without affecting the rest of what you're working on.

One last note of irony: While working on this post, I was writing it in one tab of IE7 while watching the Google presentation in another tab. The Google presentation crashed on my laptop, crashing everything else in IE7 -- including wiping out my first version of this post. Had to type it all over again. This is exactly what Chrome is supposed to prevent from ever happening again.
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