Oh dear, no, not another bloomin’ blog post about Google Chrome? I mean! Come on! How many does the internet really need????

Published on 3 September 2008 in , , ,

Back in 2005 Sainsburys launched a new advertising campaign around the concept of “sleep shopping” with the idea being that we should all “Try something new today”. And last time I went shopping, I did just that and bought a different type of butter to see if I preferred it. I haven’t opened it yet, so I don’t know if I do.

Of course we do many things just because of habits. We become accustomed to things – get confused when something changes without us knowing. And when we do change something, we can’t find what we want easily, we long to go back to what was there before.

Today I tried Google Chrome. And it felt wrong.

Initially I couldn’t even tell you why it felt wrong. But a big part of it was actually because it feels too clean – too uncluttered. There’s no main menu bar for example. That feels wrong. Doesn’t matter if I use it or not – the Window doesn’t seem to look complete without it. And I hurriedly scuttered back to Firefox.

Realising that the browser being “too clean” was a stupid reason not to try a new web browser, I re-opened it and decided to give it another go. But then decided that the blue on Chrome was too jarring. I hate all that Microsoft XP blue stuff – my Windows set up is always set to silver/grey. Chrome’s blue didn’t look asthetically pleasing.

Looks are important but it seemed a daft idea to close down my browser and on my third attempt I finally found a reason why to keep using Firefox that wasn’t asthetic. In Firefox I tend to have folders of bookmarks which I regularly open all at once. In Firefox I can do that with one click – but not currently in Chrome.

Chrome is in beta and hopefully they’ll see sense and make sure that that blue can be removed and a folder of bookmarks can be opened at once, in a later release.

The fact that the first two “excuses” were so trivial just goes to show how much emotional responses on relatively minor things, does play a big part in the decisions we make. And maybe sometimes we’d rather “sleep compute” rather than try something new.

1 Comment

  • Over65 says:

    My first impression of Gooogle Chrome was similar. One of the first things I tried to do was install the Google Toolbar… what a crazy idea that turned out to be as that feature isn’t available yet.
    Not having easy to access bookmarks is another huge let down. I’m sure they’ll change this at some point but their website history just isn’t a valid replacement.
    A couple great features abouth chrome are: One the load speed. And two, Application Shortcuts for google docs.
    Flash feezing up in Chrome is killing my experience with it though. The fact that they still havn’t patched this is really annoying since I’m down to one browser after installing IE8 beta, flash not working at all on that and not being able to uninstal.
    My review scores.
    Chrome 2/10
    IE8 1/10
    FF3 9/10