Last time I said Chrome sucked, it was because its ToS were positively oppressive, but I thought, as Mozilla are ending support for Firefox 2.x in December, that I might as well have a look at it (I’m planning to switch to Opera, but, hey, it can’t hurt to look. . .). And no-one reads ToS anyway!
So, is it any good? No. First up, I imported my bookmarks and settings from Firefox and got the same fubar as with Firefox 3 – scrambled bookmarks, and no way to put them in order.
It’s screwed up some settings that it’s imported from Firefox – for example, Firefox is set to put downloads on the Desktop, so I don’t have to go looking for them – Chrome wants to put them in a non-existent My Downloads folder in My Docs.
There is no Bookmarks sidebar. There’s a Recent Bookmarks sidebar, listing the most recent 9 websites – a pretty pointless exercise and, to me, as useless as Mozilla’s Awesome Bar. I can click on Other Bookmarks – Imported from Firefox, which I expected to open in a sidebar. Nope, it just obscures the left-hand side of the tab, and it can’t be dragged anywhere else (and as I said, my bookmarks are no longer in alphabetical order, which pisses me off hugely – how bloody hard is that?
It has a down-market version of Opera’s Speed Dial but unlike Opera, where you make your own choices, Chrome simply bungs in the 9 most visited sites. Close, but no cigar – as I can with Opera, I want to choose what goes in there.
The usual toolbar is absent – it hides in a drop-down menu, but the space it saves – wow! a whole centimetre – is taken up with the (admittedly optional), Bookmarks Bar, into which you click and drag URLs. Piss-poor, as it doesn’t allow you to allocate a folder (and with this open, I gain a mere 3mm of pane height – oh joy!). You’ll search it in vain for any way to organise your bookmarks but, as this part of Chrome seems to be taken directly from Firefox 3, it probably wouldn’t work anyway. Cookie handling is as per Firefox 2 (possibly 3′s the same – dunno).
I really don’t know who Chrome is aimed at. A new user, maybe, who doesn’t know any better (but they’d get IE anyway), but anyone with a decade or so’s bookmarks is going to be seriously pissed off (I accept my organisation of my bookmarks is a tad unusual**, but the order IS, at heart, alphabetical and neither Firefox 2 or IE have any problems with it). Yes, Chrome is stripped down and slick – too much so in my opinion – I want a toolbar where it should be, I don’t want to go looking for its component parts, only to find much of what I expect to find is missing.
** Items that get used a lot are prefixed with AAA, then AA, then A – according to their importance to me. That means they all live near the top of the bookmarks sidebar. This confuses FF3 and Chrome severely.
So is Chrome any good? No, based on the above, it’s crap. I have over a decade’s worth of bookmarks, if they’re not in order, they’re no use to me, and it does stuff that I have no control over (like the Most Visited page). There’s no way to search the bookmarks, and that’s inexcusable.
I don’t think it’s dysfunctional in the way Firefox 3 is, but it hasn’t been properly thought through and, as far as I’m concerned, that’s an hour I won’t see again! Google Chrome is all show and no go – more of a foetus than a fully-developed browser – and it quite definitely sucks.
I will tell you this I have FF3 and I hate it. I only got it because I really hate IE with a passion. Now its maybe because I love Google but I really like Google Chrome. I just got it into my computer and It seem simple and faster then the rest. Now I know it is still early but I truly think Chrome is about to take the browser to another level. anyways this is a great post. Look forward to reading more from you. God Bless!
You may be right about another level, but in its present incarnation Chrome has a long way to go before it’s a proper, grown-up browser.
I had hoped that Google would have created Chrome from the ground up, but they haven’t, they’ve just cobbled together bits from other browsers (a fact of which they make no secret). It’s just a shame they didn’t use the best bits! For me it embodies the worst of Firefox 3 and IE7, and makes a pigs ear of Opera’s Speed Dial. It just doesn’t do the things I want a browser to do – it’s simply too basic.
“So, is it any good? No.”
“It has a down-market version of Opera’s Speed Dial but unlike Opera, where you make your own choices, Chrome simply bungs in the 9 most visited sites.”
“The usual toolbar is absent – it hides in a drop-down menu, but the space it saves – wow! a whole centimetre – ”
“Piss-poor, as it doesn’t allow you to allocate a folder (and with this open, I gain a mere 3mm of pane height – oh joy!).”
“Yes, Chrome is stripped down and slick – too much so in my opinion – I want a toolbar where it should be, I don’t want to go looking for its component parts, only to find much of what I expect to find is missing.”
“So is Chrome any good? No, based on the above, it’s crap.”
Absolutely hilarious review; quite thorough. Much better than I could’ve done myself. We agree on all the major points. The only difference is I *do* read the ToS, and that alone is enough to keep me from using Chrome forever. Not to mention I don’t like the browser for the same reasons that you don’t. It’s not all that no matter how anyone tries to paint it up. In this case, the Emperor really has no clothes.
Now that’s the sort of comment that makes it all worth while!
ToS – well, that’s two of us then. . . Trouble is, though, that most people don’t read ToS, and they should. Anyway, I’ve no idea how Google hope to enforce the ToS – unless there’s a massive slab of spyware lurking in Chrome’s code, and since it swiped supposedly confidential data – passwords – from Firefox there probably is. Makes me wonder how secure Firefox is, too. . .
I read that they amenda the ToS.
Also, on a sort of tangential note, say you copy your favorites to another computer (say you’re upgrading), it puts them in regular alphabetical order. You have a weird system – but I don’t have mine in alphabetical order at all, so my order would be more fucked up than yours (and was on my other computer that I was thinking of making my main one).
This speed dial thing I’m not familiar with. Are you talking internet phone?
Also, search bookmarks? What for?
Nope, speed dial is nothing to do with VOIP – it’s a tab where your favourite 9 websites live or, in Chrome’s case, the 9 sites it thinks you ought to have – check out Opera. I thought that was clear from the context.
Why search bookmarks? I’ve got over a decade’s worth of the buggers, there’s no way I can remember everything that’s in there , and I’m not going to scroll through them all looking. Life’s way too short. I just type in a keyword and all the relevant bookmarks are displayed. Easy.
Darn right Ron about the bookmarks. Not to have some way of organizing and correcting book marks and putting them in folders is like serving up a steak without a knife and fork.
You have missed the saving grace with the complaint about speed dial though. In Tools on the right there are Options, and they allow you to specify whatever you want in the Speed Dial ie the pages you want to open when you boot Chrome.
But that’s it for control over bookmarks. If they are so smart and well paid and cosseted with fine food at Google why dont they come back from lunch and USE the darn thing and see how unusable any browser is without bookmarks control.
Maybe they were rushing it out for some reason. But it is a disgrace for them as it is. Unusable by any power user.
So much for Google’s image as the new Microsoft. It’s the old Microsoft back again!
Another thing is some lack of ability to retrieve the pages open if you close Chrome for some reason, It will replace them if you crash or it is otherwise forcibly interrupted but there is no option to keep them coming back if you close it voluntarily, as I recall.
So you lose 25 pages of research except by going into history and laboriously reclaiming them.
On the other hand, the ability to move pages on tabs to other pages or just turn them into pages in their own right is BOFFO!
It means you can click a link in gmail to some interesting topic, then if you find the page resulting interesting you can out it on its own, so it is listed in the list of pages and not buried behind some other page.
This is VERY USEFUL for a power surfer.
Yeah, but who in their right mind wants to use Google Mail? You do realise that Google scans through email for keywords to allow them to target advertising? And that’s just the nosiness they admit to.
If you want an email address that goes everywhere with you, buy a domain name and use a decent email client, like Outlook or T-bird. Webmail is toytown.
This comment relates to a juvenile fruitcake named Aelin, whose abusive comments have been deleted in the interests of my blood pressure…
A beta is about getting the bugs out, fuckwit, not about seriously defective functionality. Chrome is fundamentally flawed because its source code – cherry-picked from other browsers, including the scrofulous Firefox 3 – is flawed, but I wouldn’t expect a dumbass like you to understand that. Still, one lives in hope. . .
By the way, rabid bitches like you only get one bite – just remember who controls the delete button. If you can find sufficient functioning brain cells, that is. I’ve no idea where you live – a long way off, judging by your bravery – but if you are close at hand, and you’d like to meet me face to face I’d take great pleasure in kicking the shit out of you. Skanks like you, who hide behind their keyboards are the worst kind of sub-human, gutless, pond life.
And by the way, even abusive losers like you ramp up my hit rate, so you’re actually doing me a favour.
Ron are you high on some bad coke? You replied to the wrong guy!
Are you aware that Gmail also loses mail – according to some dumbasses like me and a friend.
But contrary to your advice even though I have my own 350 GB on a server at Bluehost I wont move to email there because Google searches like crazy.
However Chrome is shit so far which cant display half the video on the Web or loses sound etc in Vista 64 so I can see it is sub beta.
Nope, it’s not aimed at you but to a weird child who’s been annoying me and who’s been deleted – see amendment. You unfortunately happened along before I amended my comment. (OK, I forgot…)
I’m glad their are some people out there ho don’t blindly follow Google – it looks like most people automatically think their stuff is the best
Tryed chrome for 3 days this weekend, omg it sucks nothing but a pain, can not shut it down, dont refresh no bookmarks tools (well one in beta thats rubish)
Defo going to back to firefox for now maybe even going to try somthing eles.
FF 3.5.3 is pretty damn good, and so is Opera. The turbo option slows it down though!
I Was looking at Opera but could not find many addons/plugins for it. Dose look nice tho and lol @ the turbo slowing it down they never learn.
Ill go back to firefox and try out Opera at the same time.
Thanks for the heads up
lol just noticed who u are, i know u
U still playing in the band?
Hate to disappoint, but I’m not who you think I am. . .
U know paul from the pc shop in wallasey?
If not then sorry my bad
Nope, ‘fraid not. . .
No worrys sos to do ya head in lol
Thanks for the help
I love Chrome for the Mac. Granted they already fine tuned some bugs for PC, which may have given them ideas of troubles to look for in the Mac beta, but it’s quick, and thats what i’m looking for in a browser. I’m a student, so I have bookmarks that I use regularly, but other than that I do searches and remember sites I liked. Bookmarks never caught on for me in depth I guess. It seems to me that the people who are critiquing Chrome are looking for what Google is trying to get away from, a clunky application of a browser. Chrome is meant to be light, a window to the web, as opposed to a Virtual Machine in which the web can run. I like it for this reason.
Google Chrome is so stupid. Sometimes I type in the address I want to go to on the address bar and NOTHING HAPPENS!! I click on a thumbnail instead to take me to a website and NOTHING HAPPENS! It’s very frustrating! I don’t know why people say it’s so much better than firefox. Honestly, I miss my firefox, but it was slowing down my computer. Speaking of slow, Chrome isn’t really that fast as they say..which isn’t really surprising at all.
I don’t know what all the fuss is all about. I imported my bookmarks from Firefox without issues, and they kept the same system I already had.
The downloads went to the same location.
There is no menu bar, but I adapted to this, I quite like using it without because how often did I really use the one on IE or FF? Never.
For me as an IT professional working with the web, it just works and does what it says on the tin. I have it on my home pc, server, mac and work pc, and a few other people who are allowed to install stuff have it too and love it.
Thats my 6 eggs anyway
Each to their own. I still think it’s more an embryonic browser than a serious tool. And, of course, it sucks you into the evil empire. Other than their search engine, I’m happy to have as little to do with Google as possible.