A particularly useful feature is what appears when you open a new tab. Rather than opening to a blank page or your home page, it opens to a page that lists your nine most visited Web pages with a thumbnail for each, a recent bookmark list, recently closed tabs and a search box that lets you search through the history of sites you've visited. Internet Explorer 8 offers a similar feature.

Chrome lacks some very important and basic tab-handling features that other browsers have. When you close Firefox, for example, it asks whether you want to save your tabs so that you can reopen them all automatically the next time you launch your browser. Chrome has no such feature. Worse yet, it doesn't even ask if you really want to close your browser, so you may find yourself losing entire browsing sessions.

A new tab opens to a page that lists your nine most visited Web pages.

These are significant shortcomings, and one hopes that Google will add these features in future versions.

Privacy and security

Chrome has all the security features you'd expect in a modern browser, including a pop-up blocker and an antiphishing tool. As with other browsers, when you visit a site Chrome considers a phishing attack, you'll get a warning screen.

A warning for those visiting phishing sites.

It blocks pop-ups as well. When it does, a subtle notice appears at the bottom of your screen, telling you that a pop-up was blocked. If for some reason you want to see the pop-up, click the notice and the pop-up appears.

Chrome also has what it calls Incognito mode, in which all traces of your browsing session disappear when you close that window. Cookies, temporary Internet files, browsing history and so on go away when you close the session. You get there by pressing Ctrl-Shift-N, or choosing "New incognito window" from the Page icon's menu. This mode is the same as Internet Explorer 8's InPrivate Browsing. Think of both of them as porn mode.