What’s so great about Chrome again? It’s fast?
Oh right, it’s the new future platform of all web applications. Has anyone *seen* one of them yet? Because as far as I can see, saving a page in chrome as an application shortcut does exactly just that: saves an icon on your desktop (which is a horribly distended favicon from the site in question) that, when clicked, launches Chrome and opens that URL in it.
You know - like favourites. Something IE (IE!) has had the ability to do for years - unfortunately it never took off because people who use IE are people who don’t know what the internet is or how revolutionary web shortcuts on the desktop are (supposed to be). Also, recognition of the revolutionary-ness of the concept of network<->file transparency might have been hampered in garnering widespread appeal when it originated for the facts that:
a) nobody using Windows knows there’s a difference between files and programs, let alone a difference between the web and the C: drive
b) Microsoft launch everything wrong, and have no flair or originality, and the sole reason they still exist is they’ve made companies and organisations slaves to their stupid office software - and
c) nobody was talking about web platforms and AJAX and all that other bullshit at the time because it was still 1998 and there weren’t entire websites dedicated to talking about news about this new and imaginary world of conceptual vapour we call Web 2.0
So what is so revolutionary about Chrome, it’s design, and it’s sudden appearance out of nowhere, suddenly putting another contender into the already overcrowded browser market (ie. because there is more than one of them)? Well, two reasons:
- it loads shit really fast
- it doesn’t have add-ons - so it loads shit really fast
And one of those add-ons it doesn’t have is adblock. And 100% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. Think about that, because that’s the only reason I can see Google releasing it as a strategic milestone of any sort.
You can talk all day about how it’s release is spookily well timed to coincide with increased numbers of rumours about the possible eventual or actual release, somewhere or at some time, of Android, and the possibility of a Google Phone. You can further compare this to the iPhone, and the curve of it’s release and impact on the world of web access and phones - I would. And you can start using terms like ‘mobile web revolution’ and ‘this is what web 3.0 is going to be’, and I will spit brown chewed tobacco in your face and laugh.
But the broad facts are the metal superstructure under-girding the tower of half-real theory and folk-knowledge that we know of as The World, and the facts are: Chrome is a shit browser like every other browser that is minimal and *very, very fast and minimal*. Yes I said minimal twice.
Like an Apple product, it does one thing absolutely perfectly, and fuck you if it doesn’t have the feature you wanted. Because doing things properly is only a matter of market research, making a list of features, crossing out the ones which are too expensive to manufacture, and then executing it with attention to whatever details no other company paid attention to.
Macs aren’t the perfect computers - unless you’re their target demo, ie. someone in the film or graphics industry - and Chrome isn’t the perfect browser, it’s just another good example of a Google product: open, designed right by engineers, utilitarian, unmarketed and unused. When was the last time you setup an event through Google Calendar and not Facebook? Yes.
What’s going to make you use Chrome over, say, a real browser? People use IE because it comes with Windows and is set up to be the default (also the only reason Live Search has hits); and Firefox gets used because it’s the underdog, and is actually good and highly extendable.
Chrome has no pulling power, because nothing makes you need to use it. Nothing makes you need Firefox either, but the fact it’s not IE is a compelling reason for many.
But Chrome offers only a possibility, and a generic alternative - a tree which might not bare fruit for some time, because Google seems to love to invest in lots of clever things, but never actually promote or do anything with them.
Google’s not about taking over the world. I don’t know why - possibly because they don’t have the actual revenue, since they only get money from adsense. Possibly they’re building an infrastructure that they hope will offer the only viable alternative after Microsoft finally dies its pathetic and inevitable death - when the 80’s finally ends in 2015.
I think, really, it’s just Google continuing to look like a real company by producing a new product - one which serves the needs of google (no pesky add-ons or features that directly challenge any established competitor) and one which, classic of Google products, just happens to be, well, quite good. But serioously, what does it bring new to the table?
Well it does load pages really fast.






