Google Chrome - No Thanks

Some big news last week - Google Chrome launches. The launch proves two main points: 1) Google has a license to print money (I’ll explain in a second) and 2) Google wants to compete with every single product on the internet.

Yes I know Google Chrome is going to be a minor player in the browser space for a while, especially with such a small elite group of products to compete with. But it’s still just another gold mine app clone that Google developed over the weekend, slapped their logo on, and put up a download site. Thus proving Google’s ability to print money. At this point it doesn’t matter what shitty app they clone and call their own - it will succeed. And Google knows it. Which is why you see so many half-finished products coming out of Google every month. They know people will adopt it due to the logo, and they know that enough people will stick with it through the bugs to allow them the time to polish it while still earning market share and revenue.

Google is just throwing as many darts at the board as it can. And why not? It’s working.

The other point was that if it was unclear before, this should start to lift the fog from your eyes - Google wants to own the internet. They want to compete with every single web-based product. Period.

If Google has ever had a good, mutually beneficial, stable partnership it was with Mozilla and their Firefox browser. Firefox generates $67m per year through Google search. How does Google reward their great relationship with Mozilla? By attempting to push them out of the space with their own browser.

Firefox’s biggest problem is its resource use. Guess what Google is touting as their #1 benefit? It’s lite on resources (even though that’s not really even true).

Sure Mozilla still has an arrangement with Google through 201x (not sure the exact date), but how long do you think that will hold up *IF* Chrome does what Google is hoping and dethrone Firefox as the #2 browser (lets just face it, as long as Windows is the operating system, IE is #1)?

But I digress. What’s the point of this post? Google Chrome sucks. I don’t like it.

My first problem with Chrome was the fact that it doesn’t run on my work computer. I downloaded, installed, powered it up - got a runtime error and a crash. Reinstalled, same problem. Now I could go check out some forum posts, email support, etc etc to find the problem. But this is a fucking browser. If I had just paid $70 for a new PC game sure I’d fall all over myself to find the source of the error and fix it. But this is a browser, and I just don’t care that much. If it doesn’t work on my machine on the first install, I’m done with it.

Now it *does* work on my home computer, so I was still able to test it out. And I have to say, it looks like a Fisher Price toy. It’s funny because I don’t remember Google’s design style to be overboard on “web 2.0″ but good lord does their browser deliver on the gigantic tabs, exaggerated gradients, and endless white space (or rather, waste of space). I want my browser to be compact, fast, and with everything I need a quick click away. Google Chrome fails to deliver on all fronts.

So Google Chrome - no thanks. I’ll stick with Firefox.

Giving Blogger a Shot

When I was initially starting to experiment with blogging, the first software I used was Blogger. I used it for about 5 minutes. It was complete crap. The extensive feature list consisted roughly of a barely functional text editor which you could use to post to a single-page website that looked like it had little more to it than a simple CGI news script.

Blogger has come a long way.

Recently, Hurricane Hanna was making its way to Charleston and my company wanted a website to communicate how the office was handling it (as the final backup in a line of backups). The site didn’t need to be fancy, branded or custom. It just needed to deliver a message and be able to be updated from anywhere. So I threw together a blogger site. That’s when I noticed.

Blogger has come a long way.

It’s now a viable blogging platform. It’s still simple enough to where any idiot can roll their face across their keyboard and setup a blog, but there are now enough features to keep someone like me interested. I just setup my first real Blogger blog today and plan to update it for a while and gauge the results. I also plan to do a little post highlighting some of the main features of the new Blogger that got me interested in the first place.