Jayson Rowe's Ramblings

Last night I posted about using the “C*” font “Consolas” for your Command Prompt and PowerShell in Windows Vista.

There are several fonts in this family including a nice Serif and Sans-Serif font as well, so if you’d like to take advantage of those in Google Chrome, simply click the little wrench icon and select “Options”. On the “Minor Tweaks” tab you’ll find a button labeled “Change font and language settings”. Click on that button and set “Constantia” for your Serif, “Calibri” for your Sans-Serif and “Consolas” for your Fixed-width fonts.

You could choose similar settings in any other browser you use as well. I would give you directions and a screenshot for Firefox as well, but hey, I’m not opening Firefox, remember?

For those who remember, Tuesday I stated that after being so impressed with Safari on MacOS X that I was going to try going without my long-time browser of choice, Firefox for two weeks.

I’m now in the third day, and I still am Firefox free, but so far, I’m not nearly as pleased with Internet Explorer as I was with Safari on the Mac. Sure, it gets me where I want to go online, however it is using gobs of memory once I get a few tabs open, and it does seem to slow down quite a bit under a heavy load. I’m really not sure how well IE and I are going to get along long-term.

As a side note, I’m also using this “time off” from Firefox to get to know Google Chrome a little better. I feel bad now for knocking Google Chrome in my User Interface post. I still feel that it is hideous looking under Windows XP, however I think it looks and feels quite elegant under Vista. Every element that was the hideous “plastic” looking blue under XP is now “glass” under Aero, and it looks very nice, especially with Aero’s glass color setting on “Graphite” (my usual setting).

I’ve only started messing with Chrome a little today (after getting annoyed with IE), so I’m not ready to do a full-fledged review just yet, but there are a couple of things I have noticed so far I would like to mention.

First, I love the “break-away” tabs. I can’t tell you how many times I have had a single page embedded in a bunch of tabs, and then wanted to get one out into it’s own window. Great feature! It taking me a little while to the tabs being above the address bar and toolbar, but I’ll adjust.

Secondly, I absolutely love the Multi-Process architecture that Chrome uses, and I think this is the “killer feature” that is going to win me over. Here is a great blog-post by Charlie Reis explaining more about it and how it works to your advantage. I love the scalability that this will provide, and it’s great for “multi-tabbers” like myself! This technology will also be present in Internet Explorer 8, and here is a post from Scott Hanselman which has more info on the technology and how it is being implemented in IE 8.