Chrome: Oh yee of little faith..

It would appear quite a few of you took offense at me uninstalling the “open” browser being developed by Google. The revolutionary new thinking, announced in a comic, apparently deserves far more praise than “It’s fast, now, how do I uninstall this?” according to some.

So, here is where I stand on all this, but I think this picture really sums it up:

Which is all fair and cool Brian, who hasn’t taken a shot at Microsoft to advance their agenda, but with all due respect as of late Google is more of a Microsoft than Microsoft seems to be. Not only does Google not seem to have the followthrough to seriously challenge Microsoft on anything, it’s solutions tend to be second rate ad collecting meme’s that hardly gather the attention beyond the Web 2.0 fanboy segment that signs up for a service the day it’s announced and never comes back again.

I know that “being open” is supposed to appeal to me as a consumer, in contrast to the evil closed deals of Microsoft, but if we are being open about all this can you take a moment and explain to me how a browser being built by an advertising company is going to help me bypass the more annoying and intrusive ads all over the place?

Google appears to have done in ten years what took Microsoft 30 years to do: gain irrelevance through series of meme’s and wars on the fronts it has no resources to fight. Pretty soon people will stop paying attention to these stunts. We do like to cheer for gladiators to kill one another, but if all they do is dance around and only protect their turf there is not much entertainment value to it all.

How many years has it been since Google opened the IM world with Google Talk? You can find dozens of examples of the same – if they can’t serve ads with it, it dies. So how earth-shattering is the Google Chrome? What revolutionary new features does it bring to the table that matter to people significantly? New Javascript engine? Process isolation for tabs? I’d love to know.

What do I love about Chrome? The same thing I love about Microsoft Online:

The more time these big guys waste in a pissing match of dominance, trying to be left alone on the stage to render the soliloquy even Shakespeare would be proud of, it seems like lately it’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

These missteps by the large software powerhouses are making it possible for the tiny fish like my little software company to grow and be profitable by listening to what the customers want. The more time the giants waste fighting each other in a fruitless jealousy over who is going to be #1, the more time people like me have to take the money off the table and to the bank.

So it’s not that I have anything against Google. It’s just that I already have Firefox and that’s good enough for me.