Mozilla, bless its heart, keeps trying to make Firefox relevant again with its speedy update schedule, but it just hasn’t been working out. Google, on the other hand, with its new Chrome sweet 16 release keeps getting better than ever.
No, there’s nothing new in capital letters in this release. It’s just faster than ever, and includes a couple of nice, useful improvements. Under the hood, as always, there are several important security improvements.
If you haven’t tried Chrome yet, here are the basics. The Chrome Web browser has a minimalist interface. Instead of a tool-bar, the basic interface has a combination address and search bar, the Omnibox, at the top with tabs above that. The handful of visible control buttons consist of Back, Forward, a combined Stop/Reload button, and a preferences wrench icon. That’s it.
If you add extensions, they’ll appear as icons on the right of the Omnibox. If you like having lots of tool-bars and endless interface tweaking power, Chrome is not for you. If you want a clean, fast Web browser Chrome is for you.
That’s not to say you can’t add a lot of extra stuff to Chrome. The whole point of a Chromebook, for example, is that you can do pretty much anything you need to do on a computer with just a Web browser and a bunch of cloud-based applications and extensions. To find these with Chrome, head over to the Chrome Web Store.