When Google starts feeling like Microsoft…
Posted on November 18th, 2008 in Gadgets and Gear, Review Lab |
I like Microsoft. I like Google. I use Google’s chrome , apps on top of MS’s Windows daily. I’ve been to the Microsoft Campus, I’ve worked with people from the company and know more about it’s insides than I do about Google. So when Microsoft has “syncing” issues across its teams I can understand and appreciate why. But from Google, I would not expect this , especially given that they are much smaller, leaner, meaner. And we love to love Google and love to hate Microsoft, right?
So imagine the puzzled expression on my face when i saw this : (screenshot below)
I’m using chrome with Google’s custom search engine. Google’s browser not compatible with a Google service? And it then recommends a Microsoft browser as an option too 
(of course that is good error messaging by the Google CSE team but funny nonetheless). My impression was that Google apps and services would run great in Chrome, or maybe that is just for Gmail? This is when Google starts feeling like Microsoft. Spreading itself too thin, growing too fast? or just becoming too big?
PS I love the error reporting screen in Chrome though. Easy, nice with an option to send a screenshot… I sent this anomaly to the google team,maybe this is a known issue.
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10 Responses
try visiting Google’s toolbar page and it will tell you that you are using firefox. I wonder when they will make their toolbar for their own browser!
..and sometimes it tells me its safari too! good core on the browser, but lots of polishing left to do…
Yes but unlike Microsoft, my experience has shown that Google acts on existing problems in a very timely fashion (I hope they do so here otherwise I’ll be caught with my foot in my mouth).
Google Reader for example was a terrible app upon release and had lots of issues with it. After consistently improving upon it by taking user feedback very seriously, Google has polished it into one of the best web-based RSS readers today.
-Google Fanboy.
Google is bound to make such mistakes.I always feel that they are in some sort of hurry when they release a product..
They want to beat MS and thats all they do and usually they dont live upto the expectations.
..so we should expect more of the same from them?
Yes!!!
Thatss the reason why I have not tried chrome yet!!!
hehe well most people thought that google apps would work better with chrome but it didn’t turned out so for example open gmail in firefox and chrome and hover over your emails and you will see firefox shows a hover effect while chrome doesn’t
hover effects notwithstanding
I think chrome is good for -most- google apps, but practically for gmail. I think Chrome is the first push into the ms office realm. most browser engines do not have the functions needed to build a “ms word” web equivalent. Microsoft can expand IE but Google needed its own browser for the same reason, which is where Chrome comes in….
Chrome’s User Agent string is something like:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.30 Safari/525.13″
IE’s UA string also contains “Mozilla/4.0″
The reason for having Mozilla in there has to do with the fact that when these browsers had just launched. Websites sometimes rejected users based on UA strings because these websites were using proprietary browser features and worked only on specific browsers. IE was the biggest culprit because it has the larget set of proprietary features not supported by other browsers.
The work around was that browsers identified themselves as the most popular browser around (IE mimicked Netscape; Chrome does something similar) and try and render the site even if it was not designed for that particular browser.
Chrome uses the open WebKit library (the Apple derivate I am guessing based on the UA string) so that’s probably why some sites Identify it as Safari which is fine because if Safari can render it, so can Chrome.
Talha,
> Google is bound to make such mistakes.I always feel that they are in some sort of hurry when they release a product..
Google’s strategy is to release fast and early. That’s actually a good thing (unless you’re releasing a half-baked product). Once the core features a built and deployed you can use the user feedback loop to iterate the design and add features/fix bugs.
Mohtashim,
Chrome doesn’t appear to compete with MS Office suite per se, but it is definetly trying to compete with the desktop space and replace that with the browser. Firefox seems better suited to compete in this space though Google Gears is a very promising move in this direction. If I am not mistaken, Firefox 3.1 will offer a built-in database which might derail Gears.