I’ve been using Chrome for the past week or so and have been pretty happy with it. Although it doesn’t (currently) have all of the bells and whistles as Firefox, such as addons, it makes up for it in speed and efficiency. One useful feature of Chrome is “Incognito Mode” and not for the “normal” reasons.

Because the”Incognito” window acts as pretty much a new browser, with no history or cache or cookies, there are some interesting things you can do with it. For example, by launching the Incognito window, you can log onto another Gmail account while still being logged into a different account in the non-Incognito window. This makes sense since this Incognito menu is not supposed to have any session or cookie data from any previous instance of Chrome. Of course, this could have been overcome by logging onto that account using a different browser, such as FF or IE, but if I’m planning to stick with Chrome, then I wouldn’t have any use for the other browsers. One limitation is that Chrome only sort of allows you one Incognito Window, meaning once you open the incognito window, that window will share session data with all of its tabs or “children” windows (if you open up a new window from the incog. window). This means you can’t open up a new incog window and expect to log into a third account.

There are other uses for the Incognito windows. For example, if I am doing some kind of web development I may not want to test it while the browser is full of cache and other session data. Instead of always having to clear out the browser’s “browsing data”, I could just open up the Incognito window and know for sure that what I’m looking at is the latest and greatest.

Overall, Chrome is pretty good. For everyday browsing, I’m pretty happy with it, but I’m definitely not uninstalling Firefox anytime soon. Chrome is just too new and incompatible with lots of technologies. Even writing this blog entry illustrated that (Chrome did not properly render my ‘carraige returns’ in my version of Wordpress). Turn on Firefox, and, voila, everything works fine.