Web browsing after upgrading to Lion had been a little less than awesome. One of the features I missed dearly was the 3 finger swipe for navigating between webpages. For a while, I had to make do sniping at the miniature back and forward button in the toolbar or reaching for the keyboard. Further, the new full-screen feature in Lion left me wondering when Google will update chrome to take advantage of the new clean layout.
Turned out I didn't have to wait very long. With the release of Chrome 14 (and 15 beta), Google introduced a number of improvements to browsing experience.
The first that I notice is swipe browsing is back. Not quite 3 finger swipe but better. The natural scrolling gesture using 2 fingers on the multi-touch trackpad pages backward and forwards. While a little confusing as to the paging point initially, the feature is easy to internalise at least for me. Now, I find myself reaching for the trackpad again for scrolling and the rather seamless experience of web browsing is back again.
The other feature worth talking about is the full screen mode. Chrome featured a full screen mode since I started using it. It is especially useful for presentations especially when the slides are online. Further, it is easier to read when the page fills up the entire screen without the usual clutter around. The full-screen mode can be invoked with shift-cmd-F. Unlike in previous version, Chrome now hides the menubar as well so you get the page that is devoid of clutter.
Finally, Chrome can now hide the scroll bars. Now, this continues to be a hotly debated feature, just like the "natural scrolling". I personally like both as default in Lion. Natural scrolling feels more correct and I never liked having the scroll bars around anyway.
If there is one enhancement I want for Chrome, it will be the ability to turn off the use of external graphics card. For some reason, simply starting Chrome causes the MBP to engage the external graphics card and that is detrimental to battery life. In fact, the battery life is more than halved when Chrome is on.
Despite that, I am still a happy camper and have been browsing using Chrome since 2008, and actively persuading users to switch to this more pleasant browsing experience.
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