Chrome, Good and Bad

I try not to get vituperative, except when it comes to the way that a number  of people habitually bring their butts into the polling places to guide them in their choices while having left their brains and their sense of decency elsewhere.  But today I have a complaint to make about Google's relatively new browser, Chrome.

I like Chrome a lot, and in fact, though I have a collection of other browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Avant, and Safari, I have confined myself to Chrome ever since it first came out.   I like Chrome because it is simple, quick, rock stable, and a little whimsical -- a combination of qualities that's hard to beat..

But there is also a certain amount of idiocy at work among the people who are responsible for it -- unless, as with the proprietors  of many other programs, their excuse is that, now that they have gotten the product out, they feel that their job is over and they are not obliged to use it themselves.   Maybe they've seen so much of it by then that they're sick of it.  Still, that shouldn't fly.

If the Google people did use their browser, by now they should have noticed that  the list of recent bookmarks that is prominent on Chrome's first page does not  show recent bookmarks at all.  Instead mine is still showing bookmarks that weren't even recent when I first installed the program a year or more ago.   In this respect Chrome is only saved because it shows bookmarks in so many other ways.

And the idiocy doesn't stop there.   It extends to the graphical menu of the nine most recently visited sites that makes up the rest of the front page.   This menu is another big reason why I like Chrome so much, but nine sites aren't nearly enough, and also that menu is too capricious in what it chooses to show.    Google should long ago have enabled Chrome to show a great many more thumbnailed first pages  of the most recently visited sites by funishing the ability to scroll down.   Plus it would be good also to let the user rename  the thumbnails, and permanently.   For instance the name of Blogger on my Chrome menu usually is "Redirecting."  What is that?

Releasing a product doesn't relieve its maintainers of the responsibility to go back once in a while and improve its features, especially in a program that is made to stay on a person's computer for a long time while undergoing daily use.  The updates that Google does send out for security are okay, I guess, but that's no reason to set aside making Chrome handier to use.

Maybe one day I'll get around to directly informing Google of these derelictions in its duty.