I got an invite to Google Wave from Punk Boy earlier. I fired up Opera to start playing, and it kinda puked all over the place. Wave is new, so I guess I can't be too upset. But I decided in celebration of Saturnalia, I would give Google Chrome (Google's browser) a chance. I doubt I will make it more than a day, let alone the entire 6 days of Saturnalia, but I will give it a try. So instead of the masters and the slaves switching positions as was tradition, I will swap out my browsers.
I had given it a brief look in early beta, and it looked like it had potential, but was feature lacking. Amusingly, over a year after my last real playing with it, aside from the extensions, I don't find it much different. And it is weird, I want to love this browser, but I just can't. It is still fast and snappy, but at least for me, all the speed I gain from switching, I lose due to the interface. This is the same with other browsers as well, at least most of them, so I won't go into detail. But Chrome goes one step further in being deficient, and I think the idea of extensions is to blame. Much like Firefox, Chrome's main innovation that will get any attention is the extensions. Don't get me wrong, extensions are great, they allow the program to be expanded past what the developer could have imagined and to fit niche uses that are not mainstream enough to belong in the browser for everyone. So many people praise Firefox because of the extensions, not realizing that it isn't the same people who made the browser that are making all these great addons, it is the community. And there are tons of extensions out there that replace standard (sometimes backwards) functionality of Firefox. Chrome took this a step further...maybe three of four steps further...and trimmed out nearly everything except the basic browsing, and are leaving the features to the extension makers. It is crowd sourcing at its best, but it makes it hard and frustrating for early adopters.
