Google recommends Chrome download from main page

Google today, seemingly confident enough about their new browser, posted a link on their homepage for the download.

While a significant percentage of the news I read over the course of the last week involved Chrome and the browser wars, I’m guessing that the news escaped the average Fox News viewer.

Now everyone knows. Everyone who uses Windows, that is. The link doesn’t appear on Linux. I’m curious why they’re displaying the link on users who are actually using Chrome, as the screenshot to the right was taken inside the Chrome browser. If they’re so worried about their homepage as to sniff for user agent to see that the user isn’t running Linux (and I presume OSX) before displaying the link, you’d think they’d go the extra line of code to only display the link to users running browsers other than Chrome. I’ve already looked at the browser’s agent string – the header line that identifies the browser to the server – and it does list itself as Chrome.

I digress. The beauty of the sparsity of the Google homepage is that the nine words that make up the additional Chrome link represent such a significant percentage of the words on the page that it has the same effect of a big, flashing, yellow banner on any other site.

Google’s page teaches us an important concept. If you want to make a bigger impact on your users, reduce page weight. It’s tough, but we can all agree how effective it can be. Users want content. We should give it to them.