12 Nov 08 TEN REASONS WHY GOOGLE CHROME SHOULD BE A PART OF YOUR BROWSING ARSENAL!
1. Find It All In The Box
Chrome offers an all-in-wonder search box that lets you search for the URL, a bookmark, smart results, and popular searches based on the term or terms you entered. For our example, I chose to use “California”. When entering that term, I was able to get an option to search Google for California, go to the State of California website, and even search for the California Lottery and the California DMV, popular searches on Google that have the term “California” in them.
2. Never Forget Where You Were and Where You May or May Not Want to Be
When opening a new tab in Chrome, as long as the tab is blank when you open it [by pressing CTRL + T / CMD + T], you can bask in the awe of your most visited Web Sites. So if you visit CNN.com every day, it’ll likely be number one on this list. With the Most Visited feature, you can track up to 9 with thumbnails. You can even jump to your history with a click of the link.
What’s also very handy about this is when you’ve closed your tabs and decide you want to go back to them again, you don’t have to hit up your history, just open a new tab and look right under “Recently Closed Tabs”. The last three are listed there and are no longer beyond your reach.
3. Application Shortcuts to your Favorite Web Sites
With the power of Chrome, you can visit any Web Site you wish, click on the 
and choose CREATE APPLICATION SHORTCUTS. From here you can create links on your desktop, quick launch bar, and more to said favorite Web Sites. I was not able to get it to work under my environment but that doesn’t mean I can’t share the YouTube video with you that Google made about it.
If I could get it to work, this would be something I would promote heavily. Just a click on the desktop and you’re on your way to your email, your news, your online RSS reader, or even MySpace or Facebook.
4. Your Tabs Can Dance, So Make Them Dance
Chrome allows you to move your tabs in and out of the main window into the own windows if you so choose. I opened about 10 tabs to different various Web Sites and then rearranged them. You can see what I did to them in the shots below. The original tab arrangement on the left and the new dance moves on the right.
5. Huston, Only One of the Many Has a Problem
With the super special and crazy fantastic tab control Chrome offers, if you visit one Web Site and it crashes, your entire browser will not be taken down with it. This is currently an issue in Mozilla Firefox. IE8 seems to have taken care of that problem by having each tab in its own memory space. Just as IE8, Chrome does the same thing but also includes its own “task manager” in which you can view how much memory each tab/Web Site is taking for its own [left]. But say the simple stats of the task manager isn’t enough for you; not to worry. You can click on “Stats for Nerds” and you’re taken to a very detailed stats page within the browser [right].
Beyond the tabs themselves, you can view the memory usage of your plug-ins as well. Since I had a couple of flash-based Web Sites open as well, Silverlight was running as well as Shockwave/Flash. If either of those ever seize up on you, just click on END PROCESS, just like Windows’ Task Manager.
6.
Hide and Un-Seekable Mode: Going Incognito
For those times when you feel like you need to be extra sneaky and don’t want your history, cookies, or form data to be saved, going incognito is your tool. When in this mode, you no longer are saving any information while browsing, and on close, everything you did use and were using is erased, leaving no trace. So if your wife is snooping around because you’re trying to shop for her birthday gift online or you’re trying to shop for pr0n online [let’s hope it’s the former] everything is secret; just between you and your browser. [I’m keeping my friends out of this one]
7. If You Can’t Abstain From Browsing, At Least Be Safe Doing It
While browsing, if you run across any suspicious sites or Chrome sees a site you wish to browse to on a blacklist, it’ll warn you. Check out the YouTube video on the right for more information on this. I give you the video because I do not have any way to recreate this example to show you.
This is the same feature that Mozilla Firefox has, so the red screen will look familiar to some.
I wish this feature would have been implemented a long time ago into Internet Explorer, back in version 5 and early 6 days, before Firefox took off.
8. Bookmark In a Flash
Now you can bookmark with a single click. When you’re on a Web Site that you have just decided is your new found favorite, all you have to do is click the Star in the address bar and you’re done. Fill out the name and click. Bing Bang Boom.
What’s nice about this is when you’re on a browsing roll and don’t want to deal with the hassle of opening an entire dialog box and navigating, you don’t have to worry. It’s so simple now, my grandmother could do it [if she owned a computer and wasn’t afraid of technology].
9. Setting Importations
Now with a click or two, you can transfer all of your settings over to Chrome from Internet Explorer, Firefox, and more. How is this feat accomplished, you ask? Well it’s simple, child.
Step One: Click on the Settings 
Button.
Step Two: Choose 
And Step Three: [see screenshot on the right] Choose the browser you wish to import from and click IMPORT.
It’ll work a little magic and you’re set!
10. Hide-a-way Downloads
Downloading is something everyone does every day in some form or another. With Chrome, downloading is unobtrusive. At the bottom of your screen, all you’ll see is a download bar. No box saying “xx% Complete” or even a “download manager” like what Firefox sports. Just a bar.
So there you have it! A new browser that I think will take off very much in the next few months!
Tags: Chrome Features, Google Browser, Google Chrome, Reasons to use Chrome, Why Google Chrome
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