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Why do we care about Google Chrome?

January 25, 2010

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I hear a lot of people talking up Google Chrome. Being a web browser enthusiast myself, I am somewhat confused about why non-nerds are evangelizing any web browser; let alone THIS web browser.

Okay, I lied. I know why people are talking about the browser. Google shoves it down your throat when you use their products. I posit that most people are jumping on the Chrome bandwagon simply due to the fact that they have seen their advertisements on sites like YouTube. Advertising works.

But are there any good reasons to use Chrome? Well, the number one selling point up to now has been the speed. I’m sure the good folks at Google have all sorts of spreadsheets and graphs they’d like to show me about speed, but I really don’t care all that much. I just do not see a noticeable difference in the speed of rendering pages between Google Chrome’s beta and Apple’s Safari. The bottleneck for me is almost always bandwidth.

Now, with the 4.x beta of Google Chrome, they are pushing extensions pretty hard. To me, this seems insane. This is Firefox’s claim to fame, and the biggest stumbling block they have to deal with right now. Mozilla almost always responds to criticism of sluggishness by blaming extensions. When people load up their browser with extensions, all the snappiness is drained immediately. Why would Chrome, a browser that sells itself on speed, try to push extensions? It doesn’t make sense to me at all.

I’d like to know your feeling about Google Chrome. You can comment on this post or hit me up on Twitter.

Photo Credit: aussiegall

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About Grant Brünner

Grant is a writer from Delaware. In his spare time, Grant maintains a personal blog, hosts a weekly podcast, and researches genealogy.

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Dane

The number one reason I use Chrome is for CSS trouble-shooting; the code inspector with the ability to turn off and edit, live, individual lines of CSS is invaluable.

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Grant Brunner

Maybe I am mistaken, but I was under the impression that what Chrome has is directly implemented from Webkit/Safari's Web Inspector.

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Drewvt

Google advertised speed to get their foot in the door of the browser market. Safari did the same, didn't it? But from this point on, they want to emulate Firefox, which has been able to grab 25 percent of the market almost soley on the strength of its vast arsenal of extensions, whereas Safari languishes at Opera levels.

Google probably figures they can afford to pivot the strategy like this because, as you correctly point out, they have the ability to put enough advertising muscle behind Chrome to make even a strategy as disjointed as this one work. Nothing to do with any inherent strengths of the browser.

My concern with Chrome, and the reason I will never use it, is privacy. It is unwise to trust an application as essential as the web browser entirely to a company whose business plan is built on gathering information about its users. (Needless to say, going even further by using their Chrome operating system can only be more dangerous).

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Grant Brunner

Meh… I'm not really one of the paranoid types. Google has pretty much every bit of personal information about me that it is possible to have. It isn't in their best interest to fuck me over. They like making money. Why would they make their users want to leave?

Firefox didn't grab 25% of the market share by emulating IE. Why would Google want to emulate Firefox? If they want massive adoption, they need to offer something innovative that people really desire. Don't just copy features for the checklist.

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Drewvt

People clearly want apps, don't they? Firefox add-ons are like a massive app store, all free. Extensions offer so many possibilities to the user already that I am not sure that there is anything wildly innovative left to be done in browser design.

Okay, so Google has several years of detailed data about you on file. And maybe they're not doing anything radical with it right now. How can you be sure that this won't change? They might reach a point where they calculate that "even if this user leaves our services, at this point it becomes more profitable to sell all of his data to ruthlessly agressive company X and let them do god knows what with it. Legally we're in the clear because the user agreed to let us have all this info when he signed up. Time to harvest! Individual privacy is so old-economy..."

These are terrible long-term risks we're taking with our identities, simply by casually giving Google the benefit of the doubt in everything.

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Grant Brunner

Or… They just use that data to sell ads to make massive amounts of money. You know, one or the other.

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darkfusion

I use it on my netbook because its super minimalistic in the way it keeps the bars compact together. Now saying that I still use safari on my mac. Strange that if a browser doesn't have some adblock built in or through extention I wont even download it.

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Grant Brunner

I find that ad-blocking causes more problems than it is worth. When I use ad-blockers, sites break constantly.

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Anthony

I am still a bigger fan of Safari on the Mac platform, but Chrome is blazingly fast on Ubuntu. It has everything I need and the plug-ins are icing on the cake. As for "why do we care about Chrome," lack of competition breeds complacency. This same complacency crept into the mindset of Microsoft in regards to IE6 and their post-Netscape business model. This put a serious hurt on everyone, which we are just now getting away from. The more browsers, the better.

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Grant Brunner

I can understand why having Chrome in the mix is good, but I still don't completely get why people are so enthusiastic. Is it just the advertising? It must be, right?

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Joshua Schnell

Completely agree. Unfortunately the quality of the OS X version hasn't caught up with the other platforms yet. I love the potential, but until I get a version on par with the ubuntu/windows version I can't use it full time.

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Trackbacks

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