“Heuristic evaluation” means identifying usability problems with your website by checking the website (layout, design, outer template, content) against 10 so-called best-practice guidelines published by Jakob Nielsen. Even after reading these “10 commandments of usability” you may end up a little confused as to what they mean and how to relate to them in the real (web) world. So let’s have a look at them…

1 – Visibility of system status

What does it mean: a website site should inform users as to what is going on using ‘appropriate feedback within reasonable time.’ Say for example you are entering your credit card details into an online shopping site – you would want to see something happening, like “processing your card” rather than waiting for minutes on a blank screen, wondering if your card details are being processed or if the website decided to go down.

Examples: Progress bars (either in line format or in a “step 1 out of 3″ format), hour glass, breadcrumbs, confirmation messages

2 – Match between your site and the real world

What does it mean: “speaking the user’s language” – what does this mean? It means that the website’s content should be familiar to those who are going to be using it. A website about medical information is not going to benefit from big flash graphics and jargon like “LOL” or “OMG LOOK AT THIS”, instead this medial site would be using clear information, easily accessible lists of information and detailed search facilities. A website about power tools will be talking about specifications and product sheets, something the Average Joe won’t really care for, but the people who will be using those power tools on a day-to-day basis will need to know all that to ensure the tool they buy is the right one for the job.

Same goes for navigation, ensuring the navigation is familiar to the people of a certain industry or sector is vital for a website’s success.

Examples: File-folder tabs for navigation, correct labels for buttons or text boxes associated with the industry / target audience.

3 – User control and freedom

What does it mean: this guideline is talking about the navigation and items to help a user to find his / her way through the site, be it to find a page or product, or to find the way back if they accidentally clicked on the wrong button or link.

The easiest way to find out if your website complies with this point is by asking these three questions:

1. Where am I?
2. How did I get here?
3. How do I get back to where I came from?

Examples: “Go back” button, “Undo” button, “Remove from Cart” button, “Close Window” button

4 – Consistency and standards

What does it mean: visitors are used to dozens, if not hundreds, of websites before they come to your website; as such they will be expecting certain buttons or items to not only behave the same way, but also to be called the same. Keeping consistency with similar labels and items means that users do not spend their time learning how to use your website but to actually go through your website in order to find what they were looking for. After all, the competition is only one click away.

Examples: differently coloured links (to some extent), links indistinguishable from copy, unconventional navigation, buttons called “find this” instead of “search”.

5 – Error prevention

What does it mean: errors usually occur because of two reasons: we either missed something or the instructions were not clear. How often did you fill out a form, wondering why it would not let you continue with your order just because your post code had a space in the middle or because you did not enter a home telephone number or an organisation. Therefore it is important that your website has clear labels and shows which items need to be selected or filled out so that these error don’t happen in the first place.

Examples: displaying which fields are mandatory, form validation, giving clear instructions during checkout, “Are you sure?” messages, clear labels (i.e. “Checkout”)

6 – Recognition rather than recall

What does it mean: imagine you are booking a room on a cuise ship, but for some reason the map of all the decks is on an entirely different page than when you want to book the room. Then you realise the room you wanted is taken – “Okay, I need to find another room, which one would I like?….Ah where is the deck plan again??”

It is important to understand the task of the user at hand, and to ensure that all relevant information is on the same screen / same page, so that a user does not have to flick between pages or windows to find out what they wanted, potentially giving up in frustration and going to the competition.

Examples: map on the same page as the room booking, “please select from a list of options” drop-down, “Did you mean…” in search results, tool-tips or help icons

7 – Flexibility and efficiency of use

What does it mean: this one is a bit more difficult to explain – originally the Heuristics were written for software use and not web use, and the guideline stated that actions requiring a lot of work should have short-cuts, or ways to reduce the work for some tasks. On the web, every user can be called a “novice user” on a new website, but once you get used to the site and use it more often you start finding short cuts, quick-links or (in many cases) you create bookmarks to find content you are using regularly quicker.

Examples: quick-links, “saved searches”, “items you recently looked at”, “save query for later”

8 – Aesthetic and minimalist design

What does it mean: this is an interesting one, as hundreds of people are challenging this guideline every day. At first glance this statement means that all websites need to be simple, clean, sparse – but this is not the case. What this guideline means is that the website should look great, powerful, bold, but at the same time the elements of the design should not obstruct the function, they should work together and not distract from the actual message / call to action required.

Examples: reducing clutter, clear call to actions, no annoying flashing eye-candy

9 – Help users recognize and recover from errors

What does it means: this one is similar to error prevention, but this time we are talking about errors that cannot be prevented at times, for example 404 pages or non-validating forms. It is important to help the user recover from this problem in the easiest way possible, be it a custom 404 page (“we couldn’t find the page you were looking for, perhaps one of these pages might help?”) or red boxes around form fields that have not been filled out correctly – don’t just tell them that the form is wrong, show them where!

Examples: Useful error messages (“Your password is incorrect, please ensure your CAPS LOCK key is off”), Form validation highlighting the error field, related links (“Did you mean…”)

10 – Help and documentation

What does it mean: again, this is something coming from the original software-related reasons for the guidelines, but these are important nontheless. Many online booking or enquiry websites have become so powerful and so complicated at sometimes users do not know what to click, what to enter or where to go. Items such as help icons, clear labels and advanced searches might already help a great deal, and how-to tutorials are even better, provided they are clear, concise and designed / written to answer a specific problem.

Examples: FAQs, “?” icons, advanced search, clear labels on form fields and sections, pop-up help, online / live chat

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Related links:

• 10 reasons to learn web standards
• On link usability – the art of keeping call to actions consistent
• On usability & accessibility – please display PDF links properly!

Accessibility and Usability? Is that this web standards stuff people are all so afraid of? Nah f*** that, who needs to learn those anyway.

Well, so why are web standards beneficial, here is my top 10…

1. Improve the quality of the client’s website

Especially in these days of DDA-compliant websites, developing a website using web standards for usability and accessibility show that your client cares about everyone being able to access their website and products or services.

2. Create a foundation for accessible content

Using web standards do not fully guarantee that a website is going to accessible to everyone around the globe from day 1, but it sets a great foundation a for well-structured, valid and semantic website structure for your client’s website.

3. Increase the number of (return-)visits to a website

Looking at the amount of browsers and operating systems people are using, it may well be that your website looks fantastic in FireFox 2, but abysmal in IE5, potentially to a stage where functionality such as drop-down navigation is not working. If your website is a pleasant experience for everyone then you can guarantee that your website will receive a lot more (return) traffic.

Also, text lines like “This site displays best in FireFox 1.5” are a thing of the past. Please don’t use them. Ever.

4. Reduce bandwidth usage and loading times

Structuring your markup language well and separating structure from content is pretty much always more compact and smaller to download and display. Many people are still using very slow or dialup connections, and the competition only being once click away.

5. Improve search engine rankings

Search engines like well-structured, clean markup. Crawlers will find all relevant content easily, which in turns may increase your rankings. And higher rankings may mean more traffic, potentially leading to more enquiries.

6. Its makes business sense

Business appreciate a faster loading website, improved search engine rankings, more visitors and potential customers. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of that?

7. Web standards can speed up some maintenance work

If your website requires minimal changes then using CSS to control the look and feel of a page can be beneficial – just a few minor CSS changes and all your links are much easier to spot and body copy much easier to read.

Sadly this point is a bit of a double-edged sword, because depending on the changes required (and who does them – it could be that someone completely new to the site has to do the changes) it can take 5 minutes or 5 hours.

8. Content becomes somewhat future-proof

Tastes change, and so do corporate websites on a regular basis. By using web standards you can be sure that most of the content on the site will still be usable after a redesign. Not only that, having an accessible website that adheres to web standards means that this site can survive years without requiring massive amounts of maintenance work to cater for IE9 and FireFox 4.

9. Improve your skillset

Showing that you know about standards and know how to apply them is a skill that many employers and clients are looking out for. Over the last couple of months being a standards compliant web developer pretty much guarantees you an interview.

10. Web standards increase job security

Using web standards means there is less chance of your job being taken away by someone working in-house or is a friend of the boss. Learning and understanding web standards takes time, and if you are good at what you are doing then clients will keep in close contact with you throughout the years.

Wave Toolbar

This one has been mentioned by me before, however it begs for a second mention. Its ability to display a website in various ways to test for DDA compliance (from text-only to website structure and error displaying) makes it a must-have for everyone taking accessibility serious.

Download the WAVE toolbar

Save images

This is an interesting addon as it allows you to download all images of a website to a folder you specify, including the ability to choose size, dimensions and type of images you want to download and to ignore duplicates. You can even download all images from all open tabs if you wish. A very useful addon if you are required to copy a client’s images if there is no backup or the ftp details have been lost.

Download Save Images

Better Gmail 2

Better Gmail 2 is an upgrade of the GreaseMonkey user script-set “Better Gmail”, but this version also works with Gmail’s new interface. If you use Gmail often or even for work then this is a must-have extension!

Download Better Gmail 2

ImageZoom

ImageZoom – as the name suggests – allows you to zoom in, zoom out, fit image to screen or set custom zoom on individual images within a web page. A very useful tools to see the finer details of smaller images for more detail or to spot mistakes during CSS/HTML cutup.

Download ImageZoom

Add Bookmark Here ²

This is probably one of the most useful extensions I found this month and one I am now using regularly on a daily basis (mostly in conjunction with quality links from @mayhemstudios, @imjustcreative, @adbert, @mistygirlph and @Minervity…to mention a few!) In a nutshell, this extension adds a new context menu item in your bookmarks folder called “Add Bookmark here”. No more dragging a link to a folder, no more “Add to bookmarks…” stuff, this one is a life-saver! Try it out, let me know what you think!

Download Add Bookmark here 2

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Honorable mentions – a useful Thunderbird extension

Attachment Extractor – This is a very useful addon which extracts all attachments from selected messages to then delete, detach or mark-read these emails.Very useful in conjunction with turning your Thunderbird into the ultimate Gmail client.

Download Attachment Extractor here

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Related links:

• On web development – How to install FireFox 2 next to FireFox 3
• Firefox extensions for usability, accessibility and SEO experts

One of my followers on twitter asked me what my trick is, so I thought I’d write down what is helping me close a sale, in the hopes it might prove useful for some of you.

Researching your client

This is pretty much a given, once you know who you are going to approach it is worth spending some time familiarising yourself with their website, what they do, and who their competitors are. This may sound like a lot of work, but it isn’t really.

The most important points are:

• Who is the client?
• What do they offer?
• Who are their competitors? If you enter their main products or services into Google, which results are coming back on the first 2 pages? Does the client even appear on the first / second page in Google / Yahoo / MSN?
• Following on from that, what are their current rankings? (tools from my previous post might be able to help a lot, such as SEO for Firefox)
• What do their current backlinks look like? (Yahoo’s site explorer might work well for that)
• Are there any landing pages set up already from previous campaigns?
• What other domains does the client own? Are .com / .net / .co.uk domains 301 redirected to the main site? SEOlogs offers an online domain search (which is currently down and awaiting an update)

All this should probably give you a very good idea what you want to pitch for, usually keyword integration, backlinks and landing pages.

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Research what you are selling

Okay this may sound like a silly step – why would I need to research what I am selling? More often than not I have seen sales guys going out and selling a service they do not know enough about and end up either “winging it” (meaning promising that the service does include something when it shouldn’t or making stuff up as they go along) or losing the business because the client has spent the time reading up on a service and is setting you straight. And unless the client really likes you you are not going to close the sale.

Newsreaders such as Feeddemon prove more and more popular research tools

It is worth reading up on what you are doing, especially in a field such as SEO where changes and new findings are happening every day. How you research your field really depends on what you are used to, many are using feed readers (such as FeedDemon, pictured right), some receive feeds right into their inbox so that they can read up on these news at work. Others join online communities specialised in that field or have a list of bookmarks they follow up on.

Remember to brush up on your knowledge whenever you can, not only will you need it when a client asks a particular question, but also because you might find a piece of information that might make your own work easier – “Ah, I didn’t know I could do that with analytics as well, ah just saved me half an hour a day!”

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As standard, you will need to be able to explain:

• What is a search engine? – How do they work, how do they get to these results and how does ranking work, why are they different?
• What does link-building mean? – How does it generate traffic from relevant sites, how do they help making your site seen as a valuable resource, how do they help with search engines and indexation?
• What are keywords? – How do they work, what is keyword research?
• Why is SEO an ongoing relationship between you and the client and why it cannot be done in a few days work instead?

These questions have pretty much popped up regularly over the last couple of meetings I had, not all at the same meeting, but it gives you a bit of insight what might be asked.

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What does your client want?

Not everything is about the data you just collected, you also need to put yourself into the position of the client:

What do I, the client, want to get out of it? High rankings may be a great thing, but what do they mean to me and my company? Does SEO help me achieve more sales or enquiries? How much does it cost, over what period of time? Or am I better off spending my money elsewhere?

You need to prepare yourself for these questions, the ones about costs and benefit especially. It is worth preparing a case study of one of your other SEO clients, showing before and after stats of how SEO has helped generate enquiries.

I have one client (my first SEO client as a matter of fact) who had 1-2 enquiries a month on her website. After some title tag and desription changes and a landing page for a specific service resulted in about 5-10 enquiries a week, she and her team will be busy until the end of May already.

In these times of recession and lack of spending a case study such as this one will help you win a client over.

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Defining manageable and unambiguous goals

Defining the scope early on will reduce misinterpretations or wrong expectations

So you know what you want to sell, you know roughly what the client wants. But how do you and the client agree on what is a measurable result? Is a high ranking in Google, Yahoo or MSN Live a result? Yes, it sounds great being on page 1 for a search phrase, but unless the client is getting something out of it he / she is unlikely to continue to pay you for your work.

What the client needs is a return on their spend, if they spend X amount of money with you then they are expecting X+Y in sales figures. An increase in traffic needs to translate into an increase in sales or enquiries, the client wants to be able to see “I am getting a lot more enquiries and sales through the site – this SEO work is really paying off!”

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The key is to tell the client:

• How does SEO fit into their business?
  This should be reasonably easy at this stage once you did your research, you will already be able to show them what is currently happening with their site, who their competitors are and what your services will mean in the long run for their business with regards to sales / enquiries.
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• What is the scope of the work you are proposing?
  It is very important to define the scope of your SEO services from the word “go”, after all you don’t want to cause any ambiguity, misinterpretations or wrong expectations!

You need to be able to define your scope of work clearly, and how it is being measured. What I tend to do is write down bullet points of what we (the client and I) want to achieve, what we need to do and how we track it, which is usually an end-of-the-month report indicating the progress-to-date and proposed next steps. So, in a quick list:

• Define the scope
• Define the services (on-site SEO, link-building, content development, tracking)
• Define / Discuss how the scope and services are helping the business to achieve its own goals (and why it justifies their monthly spend)
• Define / Discuss the ability to work with the development team and marketing team on website-changes and content-changes
• Define / Discuss how the services need to be integrated into future design / development work (i.e. redesigns, landing pages, micro-sites, website migration, additional website plugins or addons, etc)
• Define the duration of your services – SEO is an on-going engagement by you and the client, and both parties need to understand it that way

About your end-of-the-month report, these should be pretty straightforward and quick to read (1-2 A4 pages are enough). It helps having a graph of spreadsheet attached to this document, highlighting ranking positions, traffic volume and number of enquiries / sales that went through the website’s contact form or ordering form. This is very tangible information for the client, adds a lot of value, and is a very good tool to engage your clients in discussions, proposed changes and keeping the SEO progress going for longer.

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Consider – Is the client worth your time?

It can also give you an idea if it would be worth pursuing the client in the first place. It can just be that the client is interested in hearing what you may be offering, but may rather be inclined to take your suggestions on, but using his / her own developers to make the changes – and you will never see a penny.

You will need to be able to identify these types of clients quickly, ask questions about their development team, ask how much you can change the site, are they prepared to work with you over a period of time?

Make sure you don’t divulge specific information at this stage if you are unsure about their intentions, discuss pricing beforehand, ideally close to the end of the meeting.

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Conclusion

This was just a short run-down on how to sell SEO services effectively based on my own experience over the last couple of months. If you sell SEO differently, why not let us know

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Related reading:

• Firefox extensions for usability, accessibility and SEO experts
• How to invoice for design work – a quick guide
• Using twitter for your business- what to look out for
  

I was asked by a couple of fellow twitter users to divulge my plugin list, and since I keep track of them myself at times I thought this post would come in handy for everyone.

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Starting with the basics – the toolkit

With a setup of IE5, IE6, IE7, FF2, FF3, Safari, Opera 8.5, Opera 9.6, Google Chrome and Lynx (on 4 different operating systems) I prefer to keep things in order and easy to maintain and distinguish. That is why I tend to set up my FireFox browsers with Mr Tech’s Toolkit. This toolkit is pretty much a Swiss Army knife, allowing you to install a multitude of extensions (even allowing you to make some older / newer ones compatible with your version!) and editing your Firefox version including the title bar. It is also quite useful when you are installing a number of extensions at once (say when reinstalling your browser from scratch) as it can disable the waiting times and automatically download / install updated versions.

Download MR Tech’s Toolkit

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…and the usual suspects

Here are three tools you should never work without:

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Web Developer Toolbar

The Web Developer Toolbar - click to enlarge

The Web Developer Toolbar plugin enables you to check your website’s content with and without styles, scripts or images, it can outline all form and layout elements, you can resize your browser window to any resolution, and – and that is what I use it for mostly – it enables you to validate the website’s HTML and links as well as against Section 508, and the Web Accessibility Initiative’s guidelines.

Download the Web Developer Toolbar

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Firebug

Firebug in action - click to enlarge

Everyone knows it, everyone loves it. In a nutshell, you can edit live pages on the fly (temporarily and only in your browser of course), be it its html, css or even javascript. A wonderful tool for every developer, and for accessibility purposes it has a lot of options for you to check if scripts cause any problems or if other items can be done in CSS rather than graphically, or if the website you are browsing loads quickly or if any elements cause slow-downs or break.

Downside of the addon is that it is quite resource-hungry, and if the page you are on is using a lot of scripts you can expect either intermittent stand-stills or complete crashes. Then again, this is most likely because of that site being developed really badly in the first place

Download Firebug

N.B. If you are looking for similar fuctionality in Internet Explorer, why not download the Internet Explorer development toolbar from here?

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ySlow!

ySlow in action - click to enlarge

ySlow is a Firebug addon developed by Yahoo based on its best-practice web performace guidelines. It adds a new tab to Firebug and enables you to see how well the website is performing based on a grade system, followed by suggestions on how you could improve loading times and scripts.

In addition, it also calculates the total size of your web page (for both empty cache and primed cache) and is able to list all the components of that page including load time, size and HTTP response headers.

Download ySlow (requires Firebug to be installed)

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Usability and Accessibility extensions for Firefox

These are the main tools I am using almost daily. Please note that some plugins may be doing the job of others, however I am used to the way I use certain tools, so I am happy to ignore that fact.

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Fangs

Screenshot of Fangs - click to enlarge

I was working on a project a couple of years ago where I was helping a charity to make their website accessible for their blind users. Seeing (or rather not seeing) a website in a completely different light made me realise that we take a lot of things for granted these days, and ever since then I wanted to make a difference, pushing website accessibility in every project I am working on. And Fangs helped me a lot.

Fangs creates a textual representation of a web page similar to how the page would be read by a modern screen reader. Fang generates a text-output of your website (saves you listening to a screen reader and having to rewind or forward it), showing you – literally – how your website will be displayed / read using a screen reader. Fangs also displays all headers and links on that page, enabling you to see which links will still require rewording or if some links are clearly not easily to be found.

Download Fangs

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Firefox Accessibility Extension

Reporting feature - click to enlarge

One of the usual suspects when talking about “web accessibility” over the last couple of years, and the guys over at the Illinois Center for Information Technology Accessibility have done really good work with this one. Be it a quick report of your site (see screenshot to the right), showing up where forms lack labelling or listing all objects and their problems – this extension does quite a bit. Add the ability to validate your site against a number of W3C specifications and you are good to go!

It even has a bit of SEO value as it can list all headings and links (including alt  tags and title tags) at the click of a button, and it allows designers to check their website design for contrast and background imagery.

Download the Firefox Accessibility Extension

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Wave toolbar

WAVE's error reporting in action - click to enlarge

Next to Fangs I feel that the WAVE toolbar is probably one of the most useful plugins for checking for accessibility issues or omissions. What makes it unique in a way is it can display the website you are testing in a number of different ways:

• Display any errors on your site (such as missing alt-tags, missing labels, incorrect heading orders or hidden content (see screenshot on the right)
• Display structure or order of your div’s, tables and headers
• Easily switch between outline or text-only versions of the site

Especially when working with sites that require DDA ‘A’ or DDA ‘AA’ standards this plugin will come in very handy.

Download the WAVE toolbar

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SEO extensions for FireFox

I must admit, I am fairly new to search marketing, I have only started really looking into it about 15 months ago, and I am still trying to get my head around a couple of things here and there. Here are a couple of plugins I find very valuable in my day-to-day SEO activity. Again, some of the plugins probably do the same job, so feel free to experiment.

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SEO for FireFox

SEO for Firefox XRay feature - click to enlarge

SEO for FireFox is a very handy plugin, it was designed to enable search engine marketers to evaluate the value and competitive nature of a market much easier at the press of a few buttons. SEO for Firefox pulls out a lot of data for your site at the click of a button: Page rank, domain age, page links, .edu links, Alexa rating, DMOZ information, whois, links from sites such as del.icio.us or Technorati…all in one quick screen. Sadly, it doesn’t export that data in a handy file, but hopefully a future version will.

Enabling SEO for Firefox enables you to see additional information for each search result in Google, such as PR, Age, links, Alexa rating, DMOZ, etc, which can be quite handy when it comes down to quickly checking your competition for a search phrase.

A few versions ago the guys at SEObook added an XRay (see screenshot to the right) to the extension which displays a lot of useful information such as header links, incoming and outgoing links, meta information, keyword density and the ability to export all links into one csv file.

Download SEO for Firefox

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Search Status

Search Status and its functions - click to enlarge

Search Status is a tiny plugin at the bottom of your status bar that allows you to see Pager ank, Alexa rank and Compete rank in a handy little progress-bar format. Obviously that is not all, you can check Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and back links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. A handy combination!

Additionally, you can check out the robots.txt and sitemap.xml of the site you are looking at. Again, if some of the reporting features such as the Link Report could be exported somehow then the plugin would have even more value, we’ll see what the future holds.

Download Search Status (if that link doesn’t work – like it did for me – here is the direct link to the author’s site)

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Alexa Sparky

Sparky: traffic trend of a website in a small graph in the status bar

This is a plugin that was only recently recommended to me by my good friend Matt Lewis. Alexa has provided a FireFox plugin that enables you to view the traffic trend of a website you visit in a handy graph format, together with the actual Alexa rank.

Additionally, Alexa Sparky allows you to view related links to this site (where do most users go after visiting this page?) and enables you to search the web for your site and find all links linking to it (though this seems a bit broken on occasion).

Download Alexa Sparky

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Raven’s SEO Toolbar

The Design Analyzer in action - click to enlarge

One of my latest additions to FireFox is the Raven SEO toolbar. The guys behind Raven SEO Tools have done a great job at integrating a functional toolbar to tie in with their SEO tools suite. The toolbar allows you to analyze a website for backlinks, top keywords based on subject, and a cool ‘Design Analyzer’ (see screenshot to the right). What this does is it checks your site for a semantic structure, for page content, depreciated HTML, inline styling, outgoing links and – my personal favourite – it checks your site in the Lynx browser.

The toolbar also enables you to add link details to the website you are on, meaning you can easily keep track of which links you requested, which ones are active, inactive or declined, and it keeps track of the contact details and original page ranks of the domains you requested or exchanging links with. Handy? Definetly, saves my keeping track of that in Excel!

The two minor downsides of the toolbar I found are that you will need to insert a new Google Analytics tracking code (you cannot take over your own analytics account it seems) and you are unable to check for analytics or scheduled reports through the toolbar itself. Nontheless, the toolbar’s analyze tools are great and work very well, and the link details tool is working exceptionally well.

Download Raven’s SEO toolbar (read more about Raven SEO Tools)

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Are you using an accessibility, usability or SEO extension that has not been mentioned here? Please share it with us!

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Related reading:

• On information architecture and user testing – accessibility and usability testing
• On usability and accessibility – please display PDF links properly!
• On link usability – the art of keeping call to actions consistent

So let’s have a closer look at the browser compared to the competition…

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Chrome – shiny new look

Google Chrome has quite a bit of competition on the market when it comes to browsers and the way the look. If you think different browsers you’ll immediately think of the following: IE 7, Safari, Opera, FireFox 2 & 3, just to mention the most common ones. Each one of them has a slightly different look, but all of them both the same functionality: tabs, bookmarks, an address bar, a home button, a search bar, addons, history, etc.

Here is where Google Chrome goes a bit of a different way (see screenshot on the right – click to enlarge). For starters, the tabs are on top of the main window and address bar, which can take a bit of getting used to – why they did it I don’t really know, from a user-experience level I think this could have been left as it was.

Another few notable things are that there is no search bar on its own, making url-entries a bit of a pain at times. One example is entering an IP (to access the webserver for example) which resulted in Google searching for the ip rather than going to the server as other browsers would. Most notably though is the lack of any “home” button, which I tend to use fairly often among all the tabs I have open usually. In fact, there is no option of changing the top bar at all, which is a shame – but then again, its only beta!

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New Tabs – new processes

One of the most notable features of Google Chrome is how it handles tabs – they are all different processes. What this does is it allows the user to see which tab is a resource-hog or which tab is causing the browser to crash – without having a detrimental impact on the rest of the tabs. Who of us hasn’t had a couple of tabs open, some of them most likely not bookmarked (but important) – and all of a sudden the tab you just went to crashes the browser. “Damn” is the first thing that comes to mind. With Google Chrome however you are able to just kill the tab / process of the tab without causing any problems with the other tabs. Now the only thing it needs is to tell me which ‘chrome.exe’ process relates to what tab (if the memory usage doesn’t show it)

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Many browsers, little memory – a comparison

Obviously by now every developer and web user will ask “okay, good stuff, but what about resources? How much more (or less) memory does Google Chrome use?

For testing purposes I disabled all addons / extensions of every browser and directed them to open http://www.whatwasithinking.co.uk

Results:

Comparison Chart between Google Chrome and other browsers

FireFox 2 is the least resource-hungry browser, followed by Chrome and Opera. I am assuming FF3 was taking that much memory due to the fact that the extensions were only disabled and not uninstalled.

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Summary and outlook

Overall, Chrome seems to be doing a lot of things really well, it is very fast and offers a lot of functionality.

In brief:

• Passes Acid 2 test on 100%
• Fails Acid 3 test (74/100) just like every other browser
• Very fast
• Good anonymity
• Currently lacks addons / functionality of FireFox
• Does not allow use of Scroll-wheel click to scroll fast around the pages
• Image-uploaders (like for example eBay or Facebook) do not work properly
• Quick loading of PDF links
• Sunspider’s Javascript benchmark rates Chrome as almost twice as fast as FF3
• Nice resize features
• No ability to use different style sheets or edit source code
• Multi-threading capabilities
• Lack of plugin-installation or RSS discovery

Chrome is on the right track to becoming yet another browser developers need to test their sites on. The lack of extensions (such as Adblock, Fangs, Accessibility addons) will be a reason for me not to switch any time soon. I think that Chrome will be more of a social browser for now, it is new on the market and something to look at, but hey, it is still beta, so let’s see what will happen