Google Chrome is a new web browser developed by search engine giant Google. Built with open source code and released in its beta version on September 2, 2008, Google Chrome aims to add some innovations to some standard web browsing features that people have grown accustomed with and provide improvements to the web browsing experience.

User Interface

Just like the Google search engine, Chrome takes the simplistic approach using minimal design but with powerful features underneath. All in all, the user interface has about less than ten buttons, including the ones for minimizing, maximizing and closing the browser window.

The buttons of the user interface are reserved for the most commonly used features such as going Back or Forward, Refresh, Bookmark, Tab, History and New Page buttons. Other options are hidden on some of the buttons to maximize browsing space.

Tabs

One of the most unique and attractive features of the new Chrome browser is the tab button. On the Chrome, the special tabs are placed above the tool bar instead of under it, making the user interface look like separate folders.

Opening multiple tabs make it look like a series of multiple folders placed on top of each other. Adding a tab opens a page that also contains a history of your recently visited sites along with bookmarked pages and a history or recently closed tabs.

The special tabs are also made more dynamic in that each tab can be moved to allow for arranging the order of the tabs. A tab can also be dragged inside another tab. Each tab can also be monitored according to its memory usage using the browser's own Task Manager.

This way, individual tabs that may seem to be using too much memory in the background can be closed in order to prevent the whole browser from crashing.

Each tab is also considered as a separate process within the browser. This means that each opened tab is running within its own process, boosting the browser's stability and help prevent memory fragmentation.

The advantage of this feature is that when one tab opens a faulty web page with rendering problems that can cause a crash, only that tab will be affected, leaving the rest of the browser and the other tabs still in operation.

In-Browser Web Application Shortcuts

Chrome allows users to create local desktop shortcuts for web applications inside the browser itself. When a shortcut is opened, the browser displays only the title bar to maximize browser space that can be used for the opened web application.