For quite some time, I’ve been a Google fan. Years ago I tossed aside other search engines in favor of Google for it’s clean look and respectable competence for web searches. I was not disappointed. It wasn’t long before I, like many others, began to favor Gmail over the popular email providers of the time. Again, great product, and no disappointments. Even more recently, I find that Google Docs and Google Earth are also great products from what I would generally consider a fine company. Let’s face it, Google has made serious efforts to offer services that people want, and to present them in a way that is fresh in new.
But here is Chrome, Google’s newest product, a shiny new browser. With their previous offerings, Google has always been the Knight in shining armor, saving the general public from the hells we were normally forced into accepting. Google.com made web browsing efficient and gave it a clean face by way of superior search algorithms and refusal to use banner ads on result pages. Gmail smashed Yahoo mail and Hotmail with it’s usability, clean look, and immense storage space. Google Docs has even made a positive mark, and giving hope to calloborators across the web. In each of these cases, Google took an old idea and innovated. They made something that, once used, we could look at and forget how we ever managed to get by without it. But where is the innovation here? A web browser?
Well, quite obviously, this is a ground-breaking mother-fucker. Google made it. Naturally, I grunted with excitment the moment I heard about it. There was no fucking way I was going to let the greatest browser ever pass me by. No fucking way.
But then it hit me. I already have the greatest browser ever. I absolutely had to see the features. Chrome was going to be so fly.
I have to admit, there are some sweet features. Incognito mode, dragging tabs to a new window, the new tab page. All nice stuff. But then there are the filler features which are already available to Firefox, or as addons, such as Simpler downloads, Imported settings, and Safe browsing. But where is the real innovation? Where is this freshness that I have come to expect from Google? It simply wasn’t there.
I had to ask myself why I thought Firefox was so good. And really, why do I like it so much? Well, that was easy. It isn’t that Firefox itself is so revolutionary, because it isn’t. Sure, they popularized tabbed browsing, and Firefox 3 has added many new features that I consider must-haves, but the real beauty of the program are the addons. Even now, i’m using ScribFire to write to my blog. Slowly, I realized that the little things that made Chrome “neat” were easily extended into Firefox as addons, and I’m certain we’ll be seing those new addons within days.
So, I closed the Chrome browser, and uninstalled it. It was going to take more than a few well-thought gimmicks to make me piss on the people that saved me from IE. Where was Chrome then? I’ll stick to Old Faithful for now. Besides, Chrome doesn’t have Adblock Plus.
