A lot of people I know use Google Chrome. Whether it is becasue they want to use the latest stuff, they like the UI, or they are Google Fanboys, a good chunk of them rely on the new browser. Well, not to be outdone by not-so-tech-savy-people, I’ve decided that I am going to be MORE bleeding edge, and brag to them about features that they don’t have. I know, I’m mean. So, in order to do this, I decided to try the… wait for it:
Google Chrome Alpha Release Channel
I know, its a really long name. Oh wells.
Google Releases updates through channels. Everyone is subscribed to a channel, and Google Update listens to that channel to see if there is an update that needs to be applied. You can change your Google Chrome channel by reading this. You can choose either, Alpha, Beta, or Stable, Stable being the public release version. Each one gives you different, more advanced, more buggy features. (I.E: Alpha is buggier than Beta, which is buggier than Stable.)
So what is new in Google Chrome 2.0?
Profiles
One of the best things I’ve found in Google Chrome 2.0 is that it allows me to create new profiles, each one having different settings, cookies, and basically starts from scratch. This is really powerful when you want to have 2 clients open of the same service, such as Google Mail, Twitter, Friendfeed, etc. And because eahc profile comes with its own hotkey (Shift+Ctrl+Number), you can access them easily. By setting the homepage to something like Twitter, you have a hotkey to instantly see your second Twitter account and post to it.
Full Page Zoom
The other main feature I found extremely helpful was the Full Page Zoom. Basically, just like Firefox, you can Ctrl+Mouse Scroll to zoom the page. But Chrome now also zoom in pictures, and basically zooms in the ENTIRE page, while Firefox simply makes text bigger. This is useful for small images on pages like Facebook, where you really want to see who that is before friending them, but the picture is SO small.
Docking
When you drag a tab off of the main Google Chrome window, and then drag it to the top of the screen, on any monitor, it will now show a little box that you can drag it onto, and when you release, the window will maximize filling the entire screen. That is really cool especially for people that have multiple monitors and want to drag a page onto another screen. Other implementations of this are dragging it onto the side of another window, which will tile the 2 windows vertically or horizontally.
A few other features I found were Auto Complete for forms and Auto Scroll with your middle mouse click. I’m really looking forward to this release when it goes stable.
If there is anything I’ve missed please leave it in the comments!.