Google Chrome? Great so why is it blue/white?

So I downloaded and installed google chrome as soon as it was released, since you don’t need to know somebody cool to get Chrome like when Gmail was released. Why, well its not because I’m unhappy with my current browser, Firefox 3; any time a new browser comes down the pipe, I always get it right away to make sure it doesnt break any of my web software out in the wild. I was pretty certain it wouldn’t considering Google pretty much rebranded the Apple webkit rendering engine for Safari. Of course, everythign loaded just fine and worked as expected and ran pretty fine in tests, again because Chrome is essentially Apple webkit but I quickly noticed all of the flaws in this new celebrity browser.

First, there is no distinction between the address bar and the search box and the address bar is enabled with dns preloading and Google suggest. This alone is enough for me to not use Chrome. I’m not a privacy nut by any means but even I have major reservations about every character I type into my address bar being filtered through a Google farm somewhere. So my first inclination was to go into the options and disable this ‘feature’ which leads me to my second complaint.

There are very few options to enable/disable within Chrome. I expected that when I clicked the Under the Hood tab I would have a plethera of options to enable, disable features within the browser. I was wrong. You can send crash info to google, disable dns prefetching, configure a proxy, use SSL 2.0, and enable a phishing filter. Not too much under the hood I guess.

My third issue is more of design, I thought this was Google Chrome, so why is the color scheme blue and white. Sure it keeps consistent with GMail and Google Docs but why call it Chrome when its blue. I guess Google Blue wasnt flashy enough for the marketing geeks over at Google. I’m also kindof bothered by all the slanty tabs and angles but thats not too big of a deal to get over.

So other than being comparably fast, the only thing I like about this browser is the private browsing (incognito) feature but Firefox and even IE have this now so there isn’t much draw for me to use Google Chrome as a daily browser. Luckily, I can be assured that by testing in Safari, I won’t have to waste my time opening Chrome for any testing. That is until they tear up webkit, it is after all open sourced.