The world’s most popular browser is celebrating its tenth birthday this week and doing so in quite a spectacular fashion.
To commemorate its ten year milestone, Google is rolling out some new UI designs that should help users search more productivity and conveniently.
Much of the new design centers on rounding out the search experience (pun intended). Users new and old will now be met with a rounded search bar, rounded tabbed pages, and rounded quick search icons.
Beyond the roundedness, users should also be able to search both on mobile and the desktop, quicker.
Now, Chrome can more accurately fill in your passwords, addresses, and credit card numbers, so that you can breeze through online checkout forms. All this information is saved to your Google account, and can also now be accessed directly from the Chrome toolbar.
We’ve also significantly improved the way Chrome handles passwords. Staying secure on the web means using strong and unique passwords for every different site. When it’s time to create a new password, Chrome will now generate one for you (so you’re not using your puppy’s name for all of your passwords anymore). Chrome will save it, and next time you sign in, it’ll be there, on both your laptop and phone.
In addition to autofill, there is also a new way Google handles “Smart Answers”. The Omnibox above the search window, which doubles as a webpage search and “frequently searched” tool, will now show answers directly in the address bad without users having to open a new tab.
Perhaps, most useful is the “Already Opened” feature in the Omnibox, which will alert us tab warriors of page searches that we currently have buried in pile of open tabs.
For people who need to add shortcuts to everything, the browser is also supporting the addition of tabbed shortcut search.
You can now create and manage shortcuts to your favorite websites directly from the new tab page—simply open a new tab and “Add shortcut.”
There are some lesser glamorized under the hood tweaks that should help Google’s browser continue its web leading presence such as site isolation, promotion of HTTPS secure sites, defenses against Spectre attacks and built in support of VR and AR technologies.
Google’s decade updates are definitely putting pressure on Microsoft and its Edge to continue to step up to the plate with its own set of value propositions for Windows 10 users. Thus far, Microsoft has seemingly swung and missed on several at-bats with its Edge browser for consumers, but if the Android downloads are any indication, there is interest in new browser experiences; maybe it’ll just take 10 years.
