If you haven’t already swapped over to google’s chrome browser, here’s another reason to tempt you away from Internet Explorer (that you are probably using to read this).

Imagine you are reading an article on your iphone at an open house and would love to have it print out at home. Or perhaps you are in Starbucks need to print out an email for when you get home, no problem, google cloud print gives you access to your printers from wherever you are.

Much of this week’s browser news has been about the release of the latest  update from Firefox. Firefox account for 30% of the browser market, IE has 45% and google chrome weighs in 3rd at 14% (according to slashgear). Of all of them chrome is the fastest growing.

We’ve been using chrome really since it’s initial beta launch and we haven’t looked back. Like trying anything new, it did feel a little different at first as we weaned ourselves of IE but now, having to check our work in IE is almost a painful experience.

Chrome, is a stunningly good browser. Browsers are the canvas on which we paint our websites, so we are constantly flipping between them to ensure consistency of our websites across all platforms. Chrome is fast, customizable and intuitive.

The rate of new features and improvements that come with it are equally impressive.

My current favorite is Google Cloud Print. What this allows you to do, is print to your printer regardless of your location (as long you are signed into your google account and using Chrome).

google cloud print lets you print to your printer regardless of where you are and what you are trying to print from, iphone, ipad, your laptop in starbucks…

When you are at home or the office your printer is right there, however, how many times have you wanted to print something for later when you are out and about. Or from your phone. Or from your ipad which requires either an air print enabled printer or a $6 app?

How to set up google Cloud Print

Sign into your google account, gmail etc, google apps for business etc.

1. Click the wrench icon at the top left
2. Choose options
3. Click under the hood, scroll down to google cloud print and click sign in to google cloud print.
4. Sign in (again, I know, I know, but it’s google’s thang) and you should see a confirmation page.
5. If you want edit down the list of printer to print to click Manage Print Settings, then click Printers  and from there you can delete any printers you don’t want to show up.

Here are the google support docs

How fast is google chrome?

If you haven’t already done so, I would highly recommend downloading google chrome today. It’s simply the best browser we have used to date. I like it for a series of very subtle reasons, the tabs, you can change their order, you can break them out into their own window, the fact that you can search from the same place you type in urls.

The fact that it just seems to know what you are looking for. I rarely get more than two letters into the url i am looking for and chrome pops up suggestions which are usually bang on.

I am sure my every click is being monitored somewhere, by something for all this to happen, and perhaps I am sharing stuff I don’t know that I am sharing, but frankly, I’ll trade that for a great user experience.

I can also sync by bookmarks from one computer to another.

Did I mention too that it was fast? Check this out…

I can’t see Microsoft having as much fun as this…and it shows in their product.