First Impressions on Google Chrome -- Not So Great

It Could Be Nice If It Actually Worked.

So Google is getting great publicity once again after the information of their latest attempt at desktop software "leaked" to the Internet. Google Chrome is supposed to be the latest challenge to Microsoft's desktop monopoly.

Great idea. But the implementation is severely lacking.

Installation went fine, the thing starts up but that's where the goodness ends. The first snag occurs when trying to login to my Google account. Very politely the Chrome application tells me (in Finnish, for some odd reason) that the web page is not answering right now and whether I would like to close the tab or keep waiting. Well, I need to get to my Google stuff so I choose wait.

And wait I do. Until 5 minutes later I run out of patience. Still can't login and rest of the Chrome seems to be frozen as well, no other tab responds anymore either.

Ok, it's beta software. Let's give it another try.

Shutdown and restart. Browse couple of pages, things seem fine again. Go to Google Analytics... hmm... not answering again, do you want to wait? I choose yes. And there it is, all frozen again. Opening a new tab works but no new web pages will be loaded there. Google Analytics page is waiting indefinitely. In the meantime both Internet Explorer and Firefox can access Google Analytics just fine so it's not a connection problem.

So much for taking over the world with Chrome I guess. The whole point of the exercise -- according to the rather inane Google cartoon -- was to isolate the browser tabs so even if some of the web pages get one tab into trouble the rest of the browser would still stay responsive. I think it's pretty clear achieving that goal is a complete failure with Chrome so far.

So back to the drawing board, boys and girls. It's not that a great idea to "leak" your stuff out too early. But to be honest is not the first Google app that I find lacking in quality either so I'm not sure why I expected anything more. I guess I'll try Chrome sometime later when it might actually work.

PS. In the meantime, trying to type and format this in blogger is causing some severe Javascript issues both with Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7. It's the first time I'm seeing these errors so what gives? Guess software quality really isn't Google's forte.