Throwing Windows Design Conventions Out The Window

The first thing you notice when you start up Chrome is that it's different. It doesn't look quite like anything else on your desktop. You're confused for a few seconds. You can't figure out what you're looking at.

Google ignored the usual conventions of writing Windows applications.

There's a cost to that: Those conventions exist for a reason. Because of those conventions, when you download, install, and run an application for the first time, you already know a little bit about how to use it. You know where to find the menu bar, and some of the tools you'll find there. On a browser, you expect to see an address bar below the menu bar, the tab bar below that, and status bar on the bottom.

Those things are either missing or moved around in Chrome. The browser has no menu bar, just a couple of buttons with drop-down menus at the top right corner.

The search and address bars are combined into a single field, which looks like the address bar in other browsers, and which Google calls the Omnibar. The Omnibar is similar to Firefox's AwesomeBar, but where Firefox has an additional search box, Chrome combines the address bar and search in one location. You can use the Omnibar to type addresses, run Web searches, and search your bookmarks and browsing history.

Tabs are located above the address bar, not below as they are in other browsers.

Once you've gotten used to the changes, they win you over. The net result of the minimalist Chrome user interface is that you maximize the amount of screen real estate that displays your Web pages, and you minimize the amount of clutter on the screen comprised of buttons, menus, and other tools to control the browser.

The new-tab page is one of Chrome's most useful design elements. This is the page that comes up by default every time you launch the browser or open a new tab. It shows you snapshot images of the Web pages you most frequently visit, and input boxes for the search engines you most frequently use and for searching your browser history. The new-tab page also shows a list of recently bookmarked pages, and another list of recently closed tabs. All of this is populated automatically -- you don't need to do a thing to create the page.

I expect that someone will clone the Chrome new-tab feature into a Firefox extension any minute now. And, indeed, you can get rudimentary versions of the new-tab feature by installing the Speed Dial or Auto Dial Firefox extensions.

I tried Chrome on a dozen of the Web sites that I use most frequently, including InformationWeek, Google Reader, Twitter, FriendFeed, Wells Fargo's banking site, and more. I clicked many links to other Web pages. Chrome took everything I could throw at it and rendered everything flawlessly and fast -- except, ironically, a couple of embedded YouTube videos on the Chrome home page on the Google site. I had to stop those videos and re-start them to get them to play correctly.