Jolt Country

Since the outbreak of Google Chrome, many people that I know that are computer literate, that is, know the difference between a browser and Windows explorer, have complained about having another internet browser that does not do what they want. I tried chrome earlier today and similarly dumped it after about an hour. It does not do anything that Firefox or IE cannot do and some of those things it does worse.

What I want out of an internet search engine is a lot more intuitive than just showing me a list of web pages that contain the words or phrases I entered. For example: I wish to know the average depth of the Niagara river. Let's say I have a bet with a fellow goofus or something and this answer would win me ten bucks the next time we went out to a bar. I want to type in my question into the software in plain English. To wit:

'What is the average depth of the Niagara river?'

The screen lights up or a status bar starts moving or whatever. Then in the large friendly answer box below the question the answer appears.

' The Niagara river has an average depth of X feet to XX feet. This answer was compiled using the following websites:

www.xxxxxxxxxxx
www.yyyyyyyyyy
www.zzzzzzzz

thank you for using the AArdvark approved fact finding web service.'

'What is the best recepie for making a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster?'

(status bar starts up)
----------------

'While there is no such actual drink called the Pan- Galactic Gargle Blaster, There is a recipie contained in the book "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" By Doug Adams. It states that the fictional drink contains....'

blah blah. You get the picture.

That's the kind of web search that I want.


THE
JUST THE FACTS
IN PLAIN ENGLISH
AARDVARK

I would like to say that, probably, the reason I like Chrome is that I refused to use Firefox, thinking it was simply the latest in an eventually-abandoned web browser, by neckbeards looking to be difficult, like Netscape and Mozilla.

At least you know, with IE, that it's gonna be around for a while.

That being said, trying to enter text into text boxes using Chrome makes me want to kill myself. The devs know there is an issue, have acknowledged that there is an issue... and it's, what, four months later and they have not fixed said issue. So I am not holding my breath. And guess what? I'm back to IE 70% of the time, which I know will be around forever.

I see they went to IE 8.0 Are there any earth shattering improvements in the latest release?


THE
JUST THE SAME ONLY
MORE BLOATED
AARDVARK

You know, I entered the thread title wrong and it actually makes more sense.



THE
WEIRD
AARDVARK

I love Chrome because it's fast. In fact, a bunch of blogs are reporting that it's faster than Firefox 3 and 3.1.

About the time I set Chrome as my default browser I found all the things it doesn't work with -- mainly, all the things I need at work. TrendMicro's OfficeScan doesn't recognize (or allow) it, SharePoint worked okay but wouldn't launch any of the MS associated apps, and so on.

Chrome's search bar has spoiled me, I'll say that. I mean, it just makes sense to have one place to go type "whatever blah find it" and it does, instead of having to go to Google and then type that. It makes so much sense that now when I go back to IE I constantly find myself typing search phrases into the URL bar ... annoying.

I've been running IE for so long now mostly because I load and reload a lot of machines and I'm too lazy to go install a new browser each time so I end up using IE because it's already there ... but Chrome has forced me to re-evaluate my thinking. Now if they could just fix the way it handles wrap around text in these edit windows ...