Making Google Chrome Even More Awesome with Incredible Start

It’s no secret – my favorite web browser is Google Chrome. It’s stable, wicked fast, syncs my bookmarks between all my computers, and it supports extensions which adds to its usefulness and functionality. While Google Chrome is an excellent browser, I’m always looking for more. The one thing that has always irked me about Chrome is the start page.

Here’s the Google Chrome browser window in its “stock” configuration:

You can see “Most Visited” sites and “Recently Closed” tabs, but the overall look and feel leaves a lot to be desired. This morning I discovered a pretty neat plugin that attempts to make the Google Start page more useful.

With the Incredible Start plugin, your Chrome browser window can look like this:

The sticky note above can be used to type notes that you can sync with your Google account. You can also place your favorite bookmarks folder in a large frame on the page, for easy access. Want to access a tab you recently closed? No problem, you can do that from the Incredible Start page. You can customize your page’s theme, if you so desire.

As it’s an early release, there’s still more work to be done. Incredible Start does not support “most visited”, and it currently has problems with AdBlock and AdThwart plug-ins. At this writing, Incredible Start is at version 0.9.11, so I’m sure that these issues will be addressed over time. You can also easily uninstall Incredible Start if you want to revert back to Chrome’s default look.

In summary, if the current limitations aren’t show-stoppers for you, give the Incredible Start plug-in a whirl. You may like it!

What Google Chrome plug-ins do you use? Share your recommendations in the comments below.

–Krishna