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Google Chrome Start Page Thumbnails

By Jacob Cohen | September 4, 2008

I’ve recently been trying out Google Chrome, and so far I’m pretty impressed. The browser is fast, and loaded with conveniences.

One of these is when you create a new tab, instead of loading a web site homepage or a blank tab, it creates a page that contains a grid of thumbnails of your 9 most frequently visited sites, and some other links like recently closed tabs, recent bookmarks, etc. Pretty useful stuff.

However, I think it could be better. Here’s a copy of the suggestion I posted to their Feature Requests and Suggestions discussion board:

The start page’s thumbnails of 9 frequently viewed web pages is
useful, but I find it hard to tell at a glance what page is what.

I suppose I would immediately recognize the site thumbnails if I were
accustomed to viewing web pages from ten feet away, but as it is,
seeing the overall page structure with logos that are too small to see
doesn’t spark the immediate recognition I need for the start page to
really be useful.

I think if the thumbnails were able to zoom in on the portion of the
page that contains the site logo (if one exists and is reasonably easy
to find) or at least the upper left corner, it might make things more
quickly recognizable.

Here’s an example comparison I threw together.

Existing experience:
http://cohenpix.smugmug.com/photos/365901399_jvgYx-X3.png

Suggested improvement:
http://cohenpix.smugmug.com/photos/365901407_tXMVH-X3.png

I find that, with the possible exception of Break.com (due to their
placement of large advertising logos) it is easier to identify these
sites at a quick glance.

(as a side note, what’s up with GMail not showing up as a thumbnail?)

For convenience, here are the images I referenced. Click to view full size:

Topics: General |

3 Responses to “Google Chrome Start Page Thumbnails”

  1. Nik Says:
    September 5th, 2008 at 2:50 pm

    The coolest thing about Google Chrome?

    Open a tab for “about:internets”

  2. Jacob Cohen Says:
    September 6th, 2008 at 12:08 am

    Hahaha. That is awesome.

  3. Carl Manaster Says:
    September 12th, 2008 at 2:42 pm

    I had exactly the same suggestion.

    http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dfjbvhst_3cmfnvvcp

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