Google Chrome

This is an ABA TECHSHOW tip from Erik Mazzone, Practice Management Advisor for the North Carolina State Bar (and all-round nice guy!)

He advises moving to Google Chrome as your browser of choice and *not* just for techy reasons!  Erik states that there are a number of reasons for doing so.  (Hat tip to Mashable.com for helping us flesh out many of these).

Erik states, for one, it is blazingly fast.  It shares the same rendering engine as Safari (which is also known to be fast). The folks at Scriptnode.com have also noted how well Safari is at catching errors and recovering…quickly!  This saves your time when searching and researching.

Along with Safari, it has a nice privacy browsing feature (called “Incognito” in Chrome and “Private Browsing” in Safari).  Nothing left on your machine except files you may have downloaded and bookmarks that you created.  This helps protect your privacy!

Erik states it is easy to switch from Firefox to Chrome – you can import your bookmarks and the keyboard shortcuts are the same (we believe the same is true of Safari as well). So you don’t have a steep learning curve in switching.

Similar to Safari, the start page is a display of the most visited web sites (at least those visited when not using “Incognito”).  We *love* this feature and it is great to have your browser help you jump to your most visited websites.  This helps you be more productive.

Mashable.com has noted that:

Chrome treats tabbed windows as separate processes. Nice, we’ve already seen that in IE8, right? But Chrome also has a nifty way to see what’s going on: a task manager. Similar to the task manager in Windows, it lets you see which processes are active (inside Chrome), and how much memory, CPU, and network resources they use. Beautiful. You can access it by right clicking Chrome’s title bar.

Google Chrome is reported to be more secure, courtesy of its “sandboxing, safe browsing, and auto-update technology” that protects you against phishing and malware attacks. This again, helps keep you safe.

OK here is the kicker (and Safari has this as well).  Grab a tab with your mouse in Chrome and drag it off the browser…Voila – it opens the tab in a new window.  This is totally cool and saves time when you start having too many open tabs and just want to concentrate on one or just a few in a separate window. (We tried this in IE as well and it works as well).  A time saver and reduces time spent flipping between windows (even if you use dual monitors..right?)

Erik also suggests that, rather than having 25 open ‘tabs’, save every (heavily used) open tab as a bookmark in one file.  You then create a keyboard shortcut to this file and have your 25 most used tabs in a quick pick list.  Again, a time saver!

Thanks Erik for some great ideas on how to make your browsing faster, more effective, safer and more productive!