Google Chrome
Google Chrome
Google recently publicly released a beta of its open-source browser, Chrome along with a comic book explaining some of the reasoning behind the project. Unfortunately, it's Windows-only (Vista or XP SP2) right now; while Linux and Mac versions are in the works, it will likely never support PowerPC, so my old PowerBook has taken one more step into obsolescence.

Still, I just tried it out using my fiancée's computer. While I was impressed by how snappy it felt, what I really liked was the way it succeeded in getting out of the way of the content I was trying to view. I've always hated the status bar at the bottom of my browser window, but I can't bring myself to get rid of it because I rely very much on the context it provides when I mouse over a link. I never want to click on a hyperlink without seeing first where it will take me. So, the 99% of the time I'm not about to click on a link, it's just dead space. Chrome avoids this problem by displaying what's conventionally status bar information in a transient box fit to the text at the lower left of the window.

It also puts the location bar inside the tab, where it belongs, rather than above the tab. If you click from tab to tab, you'll notice the address there changing with the tab: it's a property of the tab, not of some omnipresent bar.

Still, in the couple minutes I used Chrome, I didn't see a ready way to hide the omnibar (location/search/history bar) beyond turning a webpage into an application. At least in Firefox on OS X, I can hide the buttons and search/location bars with a single click on…whatever that gray oval bubble in the upper right is called. There's probably a full screen mode, though I didn't think to look for it then.