Google Chrome: Meh

Last week, the guys from Google released their own web browser: Google Chrome. And thus, Google fanboys all over the ‘Net fell to their knees in religious ecstasy, chanting over and over again: “Google my master, Google my master…”

Look, I frankly just don’t see the point of all this. On the Windows platform you already have Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari. And now there’s another browser? And what does Chrome do that any other browser doesn’t? Well, nothing, actually. And it actually lacks a lot of the features that other browsers have, even boring old Internet Explorer.

After using it for about a week, I can honestly say that the one (and only) feature I like about Google Chrome is the “paste and go” feature in the address bar. If you cut and paste an address into Chrome’s address bar, you can either “Paste” it or “Paste and go”, which pastes the address then automatically loads the page in question. Nice, but hardly groundbreaking, especially when the “Right-Click Link” extension does the same thing in Firefox without the need to paste the address into the address bar.

As of this writing, Chrome doesn’t have any extensions. None. So you either get the full “Chrome experience” or you get nothing. No AdBlock, no Weave, no DownThemAll… nothing. Oh, you can hack together something similar to a lot of Firefox extensions – see this post from Lifehacker for instructions on setting up Privoxy as your ad blocker in Chrome, for example – but it’s nowhere near as elegant as Firefox.

So… for now… I’ll stick with Mozilla, thanks!

One Reply to “Google Chrome: Meh”

  1. Honestly, the paste and go feature is just taken from Opera, where you can either do it by right clicking or control + shift + v, either in the integrated search bar or in the url bar.

    And Chrome isn’t anything special or anything exciting. But every person is like ‘OMG IT’Z NOT IE!!!ONEONEONE!’ when there’s sufficient other options out there, including Opera and Firefox, as well as Safari for the Mac fanboys.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.