Blog 16

Not Quite There

Always on the lookout for new and innovative programs that escape the usual mold I downloaded Google's venture into the browser market. Google Chrome looks and feels a lot like Internet Explorer except that they have obviously tried to make it look cleaner and more simple.

When 'oh' when will these American companies realize that US design sucks. Technically innovative, yes but when it comes to design, well you just have to look at the fussy, overly whiz-bang, fade-in fade-out, see through, glowing, glitzy, gooey design of Vista to see what I mean. Do what you are good at, innovate, but employ Italians for the design.

So, back to Google Chrome. Overall I liked it especially the new features that I have not seen on any other browser.

But, after having it set as my default browser for one day I have now reverted to Internet Explorer 7 (not 8, that's another story).

Three main niggles:

• Despite asking for my language preferences during installation, Chrome insisted on displaying search pages in Turkish, obviously because I live in Turkey. I could find no obvious way to set the search bar to go to either the UK or the USA Google search page. Incidentally, the search from the address bar feature works very well.
• I like being able to drag and drop a current web page directly onto my desktop by clicking and dragging the favicon.ico image to the left of the address bar. Doing this in Chrome results in the whole window dragging. To place a link to the current page with chrome requires several clicks, not slick at all.
• In Internet Explorer (and other browsers) it's possible to zoom in and out of any webpage simply by holding down Ctrl and using the scroll wheel. This is not available at all in Chrome, in fact the only zoom feature available is text size.

I have to say that with a little more research perhaps my niggles could be solved, but for me any good software should be intuitive. Everyday and customization controls should be easily accessible. There are not so many controls in Chrome and I went down every avenue I could find, there aren't so many of those.

As for reporting my niggles to Google, like all bloated internet companies they make contacting real people virtually impossible or so convoluted that not many people have the time. So let the public by their usage tell them, like the 6% take up of Windows Vista has sent a loud message to Mothersoft. (Also bearing mind that most of that 6% is down to people being forced to accept Vista on new machines).

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