One of the first things I noticed about Chrome after moving from Firefox is the lack of the quick search box. At first I thought I would miss this alot because I use the quick search box in Firefox all the time. However Chrome’s address bar is more intuitive and powerful than Firefox’s and does the job of address and quick search box perfectly well.

In Firefox when you start typing you get a list of suggestions from your history and bookmarks. But you have to physically select an item from the list using the arrow keys and enter, or the mouse.

In Chrome as soon as you start typing a similar list appears, however the closest match is automatically displayed in the address bar. If that is the address you are looking for you just hit enter, if not you keep typing a few more key strokes until the site you want pops up. If your site does not popup you can hit enter at anytime and it will take you straight to search results.

This seems like a minor thing, but when you compare good browsers these days it comes down to the smaller less obvious things. The good browsers are standards compliant already, so rendering websites is not a problem. So you are left with load speed, resource usage and user interface.

Another thing I like is the minimalist interface. When you run Chrome you will notice that there is no status bar at the bottom of the window. That is until you load a new page, or download a file. When a status message is needed like “Loading Page…” a little box pops up at the bottom of the window. If something you need to click on is beneath the box you can just move you mouse to the box and it will slide out of the way.

If you download a file another bar pops up with your latest downloads listed. You can then easily open the file directly from Chrome, or reveal the file in Explorer.

I still love Firefox and I am looking forward to 3.5 with the new JavaScript engine. But I love the the fact that we now have a few options when it comes to quality web browsers these days. Which are arguably the most important application you run.