In Chrome, the Options menu only offers three tabs.

The address bar — what Google calls the Omnibox — is one of Chrome's nicer features. It doubles as a search bar: Type in your search terms, and it uses the search engine of your choice to do a search. When you instead type in a URL, it works much like the address bar in Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3: It lists suggested Web pages as you type, which it gathers from previously visited sites and your bookmarks, as well as making suggestions of its own based on Web site popularity.

When you visit a site, as with Internet Explorer 8, the address bar highlights the domain (such as www.computerworld.com) while the rest of the URL is lighter, so it's easy for you to determine at a glance which domain you are currently on, even if you're visiting a long URL.

A different type of tab

As with any modern browser, Chrome offers tabbed browsing. In some basic ways, its handling of tabs is superior to IE's and Firefox's, but in other ways, it's not as sophisticated.

The biggest break with other browsers is that each tab in Chrome is, in essence, its own browser. That's why the tabs are above the address bar rather than below it. You can detach any tab by dragging it away from the browser, and it becomes a separate browser window. You can combine separate browser instances into a unified one by dragging it back again, but you have to be careful to drag the tab itself back, rather than trying to drag the whole window, or it won't work.

Because each tab is in essence its own browser, if that tab crashes, it should not crash the entire browser. Microsoft makes the same claim for Internet Explorer 8. I haven't had any tabs crash on me yet in Chrome, so can't verify if this tab-crash feature works.

When you open a new tab, it opens just to the right of the tab from which you've opened it, so to a certain extent Chrome keeps related tabs together. You can drag tabs from place to place within the tab bar, and when they you do that, they slide in place in a smooth animation.

But Chrome doesn't group and color-code tabs like Internet Explorer 8 does. And it doesn't offer right-click options for handling groups of tabs -- for example, in IE8, you can close and duplicate entire tab groups. You can't do that in Chrome. However, Chrome does offer a variety of right-click options for handling tabs, such as closing all the tabs except for your current tab, and closing all tabs to the right of your current tab.