Ordinary Gweilo

I’m rather liking Google Chrome.  It seems far more intuitive and easier to use that Internet Explorer (OK, that’s not much of a challenge).

Of course Chrome lacks some features found in IE and other browsers, but Google clearly decided to start with something simple, and that’s got to be a good thing. 

So far I’ve found a few websites that don’t work properly in Chrome (and one that helpfully tells me to use IE, Firefox or Netscape, but still seems to work), and the built-in Google search is in Chinese and I haven’t figured out how to change it.  But I can live with that in order to have a clean, uncluttered browser.

My preferred browser is still SlimBrowser (which uses IE as it base, but makes it more usable), though unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be fully-supported any more.  It had tabbed browsing long before IE, and it still has several useful features that are either unavailable or well-hidden in IE, such as opening all links in a new tab, hiding tabs, and displaying multiple tabs simultaneously.    

What’s interesting is that Google probably don’t care whether Chrome is a success or not – as long as it prompts Microsoft to improve IE.  What matters most to Google is that users can access the web as easily as possible, and not which browser they use.  If the end result is a better version of IE, Google will benefit far more than if Chrome displaces Firefox as the no.2 browser.