Aero Glass support

What I always liked about Microsoft’s IE 7 was the fact that it was using Vista’s native Aero Glass look. Chrome is the first browser to include Aero Glass compatibility since IE 7, which makes the UI look nice and native on Vista. Mozilla should have included it in Firefox 3.

Advanced source code view

This is something I never saw in a web browser before. Chrome has just luxury source code viewer. It displays line numbers and turns everything that looks like a URL into a clickable link.

Task manager

Yeah, you have probably seen the task manager in Google’s promotional comic book released yesterday. The task manager really rocks—it even has this little link label saying “Stats for nerds” that can open advanced memory usage statistics.

Download manager

Just like Opera and Maxthon, Chrome tries to avoid using extra dialog windows. Almost everything like bookmark manager or a download manager opens its own tab that looks just like a web page.

Searching within the current page

This is something we use a lot and don’t even realize it. When you hit Ctrl+F in Chrome and start searching, every match on the page is automatically highlighted without having to click on a button like in other browsers. Too bad Chrome does not allow you to start searching immediately without pressing Ctrl+F like Firefox does.

Great compatibility

This is just a minor issue… but did you notice that Chrome has both Gecko and Safari words in its user agent string? This makes work almost every web app that officially supports Firefox or Safari. Not all developers realize that there is something like KHTML and WebKit and some of them often put the word Safari in their browser detection scripts.

Language the browser UI uses

It looks like a typical Google product. I especially love the options dialog tab named “Under the Hood”.

Prism-like functionality

The “Create application shortcut” is more useful than Mozilla Prism. Even though the browser bar is hidden when the site is running in “application mode”, you can still access basic features like Back and Find in page by clicking the window’s icon in the top left corner.

Duplicate tab

Chrome allows you to duplicate any tab through its right-click menu.

Installing missing plugins

If a site requires a certain plugin, Chrome will take you to the download page immediately, in most cases you don’t need to search through the whole plugin vendor’s site.

1. Google is disorganized

Google is probably the most disorganized site ever. The developers have done a great job making all those pages but it’s almost impossible to find them all. They use different URL formats for different services. Some of them are located at the 3rd level domains, some are available at google dot com slash something. Last week Google introduced brand new layout changes that include a toolbar on the top of every Google page. The toolbar is pretty cool and makes navigation through Google services a lot easier—but where the heck is the “Even more” button? Am I blind? I’ve been searching through the whole Google site but I haven’t found any links to this page. As for localized Google versions, things are even worse. Although many services are available in lots of various languages, it takes months or even years for Google developers to put links to these services on localized homepages. Most localized homepages don’t feature the “More” link at all and they look like Google.com in 2003, maybe 2004. If Google made the services organized, way more users would discover and use them. And I don’t think it’ll take much effort to do so.

Where is the “Even more” button?

2. Google doesn’t support web standards

Have you ever checked Google homepage’s source code? It looks like it was made 10 years ago. Google guys tell others to support web standards but they don’t do so. There’s even no doctype declaration. Some people say they want to save every transfered byte, some people say they want the homepage to be backwards compatible. But according to this nice page, they’re wrong. Old browsers would render a strict homepage better than they render the current one and less bytes would be transfered. I really don’t understand Google’s attitude in this case. Are they just too lazy to make the homepage standards-compliant? What’s your opinion? Tell me in the discussion below.

Google homepage source code

1. Download, install and run the Psi Jabber client.
2. Psi will ask you to create a new profile. Just click the Add button, the “Default” profile title is okay.
   
3. The Account Properties dialog will appear. If it does not appear automatically, don’t worry, just right click the Psi icon in your system tray and choose “Psi > Account Setup”.
4. On the “Account” tab enter your Gmail user name (”Jabber ID” text box). If you’re not using Gmail, enter your Google Talk ID with @gmail.com suffix. Don’t forget to fill in your Google Account password as well (”Password” text box).
   
5. Go to the “Connection” and check all available check boxes. Then enter talk.google.com as the “Host” and 5223 as the “Port”.
   
6. Click the Save button.
7. Go to Psi main window, click the status menu (with the gray star) and choose “Online”. Now open the main menu and click the “Service Discovery” item.
8. The Service Discovery dialog appears. Type chrome.pl in the “Address” text box and hit “Browse”.
9. Right click the “Bramka do MSN” item and choose “Register”. Note that you’ll have to send your Windows Live ID login details to this server. If you don’t trust it, there are tons of other around the internet, this one just worked best for me.
   
10. Now you’re supposed to enter your Windows Live ID and password. Do so and hit “Register”.
    
11. When a system message from msn.chrome.pl user appears, click “Add/Auth”.
    
12. Now you can close Psi and run Google Talk.
13. All your MSN contacts should appear in your Google Talk contact list. I suggest that you should rename them to make your contacts more organized.
    
14. That’s all, enjoy your new Google Talk experience! To add a new MSN user, just click the “Add” button in Google Talk and enter their Windows Live ID with @ char replaced with % char and ending with @msn.chrome.pl. If everything works fine, you can uninstall Psi, you won’t need it anymore. Example: To add a user with myturbofriend@hotmail.com Windows Live ID, simply enter myturbofriend%hotmail.com@msn.chrome.pl.
    

Notes: The author of this blog is not responsible for the transport service. This feature is officially not supported by Google. If you want to unregister the Jabber transport, login to your Google Talk account using Psi again, open Psi’s XML Console (make sure the “Enable” check box is checked), click the “XML input” button and paste the following code:
<iq type='set' to='msn.chrome.pl'>
<query xmlns='jabber:iq:register'>
<remove/>
</query>
</iq>

Then click “Transmit”. You’ll get unregistered from the MSN transport in a few moments.