sprocket i/o

I’ll admit, I wasn’t that excited about Google’s new open-source web browser, Chrome, because at the moment it’s for Windows only. Curious about it, I installed it under VMware Fusion in order to test it. My first thoughts are that Chrome, while very spartan, is extremely fast. While the Chrome Comic Book describes all of the cool features in Chrome, I’d like to highlight my favorite: Application Shortcuts.

If you are like me, you probably have a web application such as GMail, Google Reader, or Facebook that you leave open in a tab all day. Sometimes, you accidentally close the tab, or the web browser requires a restart, lose that window, and have to put all of the details back in. Sometimes, you feel like you could use an extra bit of screen real-estate for that web application. All of these are covered by Chrome by creating an Application Shortcut. Next to the toolbar, you’ll see a little icon that looks like a page. Visit any website, then click on the page icon to see this:

If you select it, you will be prompted to do something with this shortcut:

You’ve now transformed this webpage into an application that is sitting on your desktop:

If you click on it, it will launch your application, but without any browser decorations, preserving your precious screen real-estate:

If you look at the task bar at the bottom, you will see that this new application is treated as a separate browser instance entirely. It gets it’s own icon and name, which makes it easy to find. Just to demonstrate how much screen real-estate this mode saves, lets fire up Gmail in Firefox 3.0:

Some might say that this feature is just stolen from other plug-ins or web browsers, but I think this brings a whole new level of convenience to the end-user. I eagerly await a Linux version so that I can use it on my OLPC XO-1, where screen real-estate is very precious indeed.