Pencils Down

I have started using Chrome more and more often.  It sounds like that is happening with a lot of other people as well.  It is nice having such a clean interface.  Seems like every time IE gets upgraded they odd more noise around the edges.

It is odd though:

- some sites do not support IE, but do support Chrome.  At first I thought this was just a lark, but becoming more common as developers get tired of jumping through hoops to support version x of IE.

- when I first installed Chrome it kept complaining about a MS VC++ dll missing.  Why on earth is Google counting on MS for anything?

- happened to pull up task manager for another reason and saw quite a few instances of chrome running.  from my desktop I only had 1 running (pandora, but so what).  why all these processes running?

- not sure I am hearing about many corporate desktops promoting Chrome as the browser of choice.  or is Google even pushing that way?

- chrome store is a nice idea.  it makes sense when running from your smartphone.  doesn’t feel like the metaphor really works on the desktop.

I always fall back to what do non-tech users use.  Not sure if installing Chrome (even though google.com pesters them every time the page is run) is a common enough occurrence outside of tech arenas.

Downloaded this on home machine running Vista.   It feels IE7-ish: big stupid buttons, lots of screen space used in wierd ways.

I haven’t played too long, but it looks like some developer stuff is buried underneath with the Google Gears engine.  Can’t wait to play more.

More disturbing is that web page size appears to be ‘enlarged’ somehow.  I poked at a few sites I go to all of the time and they all appeared to be magnified.  I didn’t see any obvious zoom feature that could be turned off.

My only real concern here is Chrome gets well-adopted (you can bet it will) and then Chrome becomes yet another browser target that has to be specially crafted in web page generation css and html.

We’ll see.