Is it time to ditch IE for Chrome?

I may be the last tech writer on the planet to test drive Google’s johnny-come-lately browser, Chrome. My response when it launched a year ago was, ‘Do we need another browser?’

But IE8 has been driving me crazy – reasonably quick connections but lo-o-ong delays in displaying all the ad content on pages, which momentarily freezes the browser window – and I happened to stumble on a TechCrunch post on Chrome. So, what the heck.

First impressions? Yes, Chrome is way faster, and that goes a long, long way. But feature-wise, it can’t touch IE8.

Some minor irritants encountered in the first hour using Chrome:

• In Win7, when you mouse over the IE icon in the task bar, Windows displays good-size thumbnails of all your open tabs strung out above the bar. So you can go directly to the tab you want. With Chrome, you only see the currently open tab. You have to activate Chrome and then select the tab you want from within the app.

• In IE, you can choose to open new tabs to your home page. Not with Chrome. When you open a new tab, your only choice is a page showing recently closed and most visited pages. Not a bad idea, and of course your home page will almost always be there (and you can tell Chrome to keep it there always), but it means one more click before you get what you want.

• Speaking of home pages, mine has links that aren't underlined. Chrome kindly added the underlining for me. (Except I didn't want it.)

• To search using your default search engine (Google by default naturally), you type search terms into the address field rather than a separate search field. This is not entirely intuitive (coming from IE) and it means you get a mish-mash of saved search terms and visited pages in the drop-down. I could probably get used to this one, though.

Could Google fix the others? Probably not on the first one. IE8 is tightly integrated with Win7, virtually part of it. (Remember the anti-trust case against MS?)

The second one: I can’t see why they couldn’t at least make it a user option. Third one: a bug to be fixed possibly?

Still, did I mention that Chrome is really fast?

Windows 7 - the little things add up

Back to Microsoft Windows 7, which is still performing better and with fewer problems on my main desktop PC than Vista ever did. (I’m holding my breath.)

In this first in an occasional series of updates on the experience with Win7 Release Candidate 1 (available for another couple of weeks as a free download), I want to take a closer look at the new taskbar, which I mentioned in a previous post. It’s significantly improved.

Under Vista, when you mouse over an icon for a program in which one document is open, you see a thumbnail of the document, but it's really too small to be useful. If multiple documents are open, you see a not very useful stack of thumbnails, with only the top one visible. (Tap the icon and you get a pop-up list of document names.)

Windows 7 improves on this in a few ways. When you mouse over a program with multiple open documents, a row of significantly larger thumbnails appear side by side above the taskbar. You can see enough to, for example, distinguish Outlook Inbox from Outlook Calendar, making it easier and faster to select the document or activity you want.

Furthermore, when you mouse over a thumbnail, the document moves temporarily to the top of the desktop and appears full size. (Microsoft calls this taskbar peek.) So you can easily read or see information without having to switch to a different program or document.

This is a real convenience if, like me, you’re constantly being interrupted in a task and forget information in another open document that you need to complete the job at hand.

Windows 7 - Microsoft Gets It Right

Act soon if you want to test drive Windows 7, Release Candidate 1, the almost-final version of Microsoft’s new Windows operating system. The shipping version is due out in October. RC1 will be available as a free download for a couple more weeks. After that, you’ll have to wait until October and pay full price.

Win7 offers no earth-shatteringly new features or functions, but does have a few nice enhancements, such as the improved task bar with its big, pop-up preview windows that go to full-screen when you mouse over them. This is also a smaller, more efficient – installs and starts faster – and less problem prone operating system than Vista.

If you’re fed up with Vista, as I was after months of seemingly insoluble performance problems, you might even want to make the permanent switch to Win7 now. If not, you can set up your system to boot with either Vista or Win7. For a discussion of how, when and why to switch, see this story I wrote recently for SmallBusinessComputing.