Nicole Gagliardi

On September 2, 2008 Google Chrome was released. Many were instantly excited and a few of us were instantly annoyed because our first thought was “one more browser to check our web sites sites in”.

I downloaded it immediately to check it out. I expect much tighter and flashier design elements from the browser named “Chrome”, but instead it looks plain and boring. I don’t mind the minimalism, but I would like a little personality. Beyond the design though I am pleased with the features. I love how there is URL bar can also be used to enter a search and I definitely noticed that is very really fast. It opens in an instant and I haven’t noticed any delays when using the browser where I have to wait while it stops to “thinks” about what to do.

I’ve been developing a fairly complicated web site over the past three weeks and think it’s a good test for how Chrome interprets CSS. The bottom line is that the release of Chrome did not complicate the development at all. The only wierd thing I rand into was that the very first line of the stylesheet needed to be:

@charset “utf-8″;

If you had anything else in line 1, even a comment, the font-family you defined in the body tag for the web site would be ignored and your text would default to Times New Roman.

Download Google Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome

See the list of features for Chrome: http://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/en-US/features.html

Both a friend and I started having the exact same problem a few weeks ago, IE7 would crash, restart, crash, restart and…. guess what…. wait for it…. wait for it…. yup it would crash again! How did you know that?

I don’t use IE frequently so I decided to ignore it for a few weeks. Unfortunately I did need to use IE this weekend to test some things, so I looked into fixing the problem which occurs because IE becomes “unstable” (maybe it forgot to take it’s meds). The solutions I found are annoying, you can uninstall and reinstall OR return IE7 back to its default settings.

I immediately reset the browser to it’s default settings and the problem was solved. Since I never use IE7, and haven’t even changed a single setting since I got the browser I had no problem doing a reset. I feel bad, however, for people who actually use this as their main browser and lose pop-up blocking setting, security setting, accessibility settings etc. At least you don’t loose you bookmarks if you are able to just reset the browser though. So try the directions below first if you experience the same problem.

1. Go to Tools > Internet Options.
2. Click the Advanced tab. (If IE7 won’t even open without crashing, right-click on your IE7 desktop icon and select Properties. Then click the Advanced tab.)
3. Click the Reset… button.
4. Click Reset.
5. Close and reopen your browser when prompted.

If these don’t work and you are still having a problem uninstall the browser and either reinstall it, or consider getting Firefox.