On a scale of 1to10, Google Chrome just got cooler.
This post is off-topic. Meaning, it’s outside the scope of “storage” month. But I’m excited about a new feature of Google Chrome, and that’s inspired me to write. M.G. Siegler at Techcrunch wrote a post today about Google Chrome’s latest update to version 3.0. Chrome is also a little more than a year old – I’ve been using it consistently pretty much that whole time. I like it a lot.
Chrome 3.0 has made all kinds of performance and benchmarking improvements and upgrades – javascript thingamajigs load waaaay faster than they did before, blah blah blah. That’s all cool, and I’m glad the browser is better-performing and more reliable now. But to be truthful I don’t know that much about the technical side of web-browsing, and I don’t want to pretend that I do. I take it at face value that the performance is now better than it was (seems great to me.)
What does impress and please me is a feature I hadn’t noticed previously – the ability to create application shortcuts out of a webpage. This is very similar to what Fluid does on the Mac OS, and this is nothing really new. But it’s cool. Basically, you can take a website of your choosing, and using the “Control the current page” dropdown at the top right, you can create a shortcut for that website on either the desktop, the start menu, or the quick launch bar. For instance, I turned Pandora into a shortcut. This does a couple things:
1. You can launch said webpage as a standalone app, as opposed to a browser tab or browser window
2. The page looks like an app, with not URL bar or other navigation tools
3. If you close your browser, that application stays open
Again, this is very similar to what Fluid does. And Google did a nice job of incorporating the site’s own iconography and favicons to make the shortcuts look decent. I like using the quick launch personally, cause I dislike a cluttered desktop. Oh lord, my OCD is showing.
Fluid rocks, and this little feature is a nice move in a similar direction. If I gave it a numeric rating, it would be an 8 out 10.
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