It’s the details that count
Friday, September 5th, 2008
I’ve been using Google Chrome for a few days now and I must say, I love it. First and foremost, it is faster than anything I’ve ever used. It is also better laid out, easier to use and the whole process containment for each tab is fantastic - no browser crashes yet, even when certain tabs have crashed. But the more I use it, the more little details I find. The little details that really show that time and thought went into developing Chrome.
Take this one for example:
When you first load up a page, the space to the left of the page title in the tab shows a little animation of a spinning line. At first the line moves counter-clockwise and is colored gray.
After a second the line changes color and direction, to blue and clockwise.
Intrigued, I paid a little more attention and, I’ll be damned. The line is gray and counter-clockwise while the browser is waiting on the server to respond to the initial request, then changes to blue and clockwise while loading the actual content.
Nice touch. Not only that, it functions as a subtle visual indicator of what is going on behind the scenes without being in your face. If you look close you will also see a small dialogue box in the lower left corner that gives you the same info, but the text is so unobtrusive that I didn’t even notice it until I started looking.
Hats off to Google. Nice browser; now, please, just get us a Mac version.
