// September 7th, 2009 // View Comments // Review, Software
Google Chrome
You may ask yourself, why should I switch from Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari to Google Chrome? Well, I think I have plenty of reasons for you to at least give it a try and maybe you’ll convince yourself. One of the biggest reasons that I think Chrome rocks is the JavaScript engine behind it. The JavaScript virtual machine that Chrome is based on, V8 – is one of the fastest on the block. Give it a test for yourself on javascript heavy websites such as Gmail, Google Docs, or Facebook.
Some major features you’ll love-
- Automatic root URL highlighting
- Every tab runs independantly, so if one crashes, everything else will stay
- Drag any chrome tab out of the window and into a new one
- Drag and drop downloads out of Chrome’s status bar and onto your desktop to save them there, or into any Explorer window to save them there.
- Click and drag any textarea corner to resize it to your liking, such as in a comment box on a blog
- Extremely fast startup and loading of pages
If you are serious about testing out Chrome, I would strongly suggest trying the dev channel. Google has three different versions of Chrome that you can try. The first is the main public release(stable), then the beta, and finally the dev edition. They are supposed to progressively become less stable as they push the newest features and test less as you go down the line. I have been on the dev channel for a few months now and have had few issues. So if you don’t mind being a bit risky with your browser, this is the way to go.
The Google Chrome Early Access Release Channels(beta/dev) can be found here:
http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel
If you want to try out the stable current release just head over to http://www.google.com/chrome
Click and drag any textarea corner to resize it to your liking
Drag and drop downloads out of Chrome’s status bar and onto your desktop to save them there, or into any Explorer window to save them there. (You already know you can drag and drop a Chrome tab out into a new window, or back into an existing Chrome window to dock it there.
Drag any chrome tab out of the window and into a new one.
Automatic root URL highlighting
Extremely fast startup and loading of pages
Every tab runs independantly, so if one crashes, everything else will stay.
The JavaScript virtual machine that Chrome is based on, V8 – is one of the fastest on the block. Give it a test for yourself on javascript heavy websites such as Gmail, Google Docs, or Facebook.
-DPollitt
I have been trading Dave Matthews Band concerts via the internet for many years. Traders of these shows prefer to distribute the concerts in a lossless format as opposed to an MP3 that has a loss of quality. This creates a bit of a problem when you go to add the files to something like an iPod or MP3 only player. For years I was using the mkw Audio Compression tool, but now that I am on Windows 7 64bit it no longer is working for me. I found a new solution – Trader’s Little Helper. It will take your flac, mkw, or shn files amongst others – and convert them to wav, flac, or mp3. The only thing I did to convert it to MP3 was select Format>Convert encoding format then selected the Target Format to be mp3. Added my .shn files, and BOOM – 3mins later on a quadcore I was in business. Check out the software here: Trader’s Little Helper at easytree.org
