10th March, 2014  

Reasons that normal people install Google Chrome

A quick reference for every stuck-up web app developer who can’t be bothered to support even the latest version of Internet Explorer:

No. 1. Didn’t untick the box when installing Adobe Reader or some other crap that Google have paid to push installs.

No. 2. Home page of world’s most popular search engine tells them it will make their Internet faster:

"ooh, faster intarwebs!"

No. 3. It was installed for them by a techie relative who was screaming about IE only being good for downloading other browsers.

…
No. 28: They were accosted by the EEA Browser Choice update and Google was the only name they’d heard of.
…
No. 1564: They made an active choice to install Google Chrome to take advantage of its superior HTML5 support.

Got it? Good. Because the next time you tell me that the reason so many people are moving away from Internet Explorer is because of HTML5 support, I will print off your email 100 times, screw those 100 copies into a giant ball, drive to your office, and cram it into a very uncomfortable place.

About The Angry Technician

The Angry Technician is an experienced IT professional in the UK education sector. Normally found in various states of annoyance on his blog. All views are those of his imaginary pet dog, Howard.

12 responses to “Reasons that normal people install Google Chrome”

  1. MarkP says :

    So they can get the MediaHint plug in to watch US Netflix in, Canada, England,…
    At least that was my only reason for it.

  2. yo says :

    How about Firefox?

  3. Nate says :

    It’s simple. IE is so slow and clunky to use compared to Firefox and Chrome. The user experience can be frustrating sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Windows fan and feel like it gets unfairly dumped on by most, but IE doesn’t help the cause in converting OS X users.

    • The Angry Technician says :

      As regular user of all 3, I’m going to have to disagree with you there. I find Firefox to be generally the slowest, while Chrome can be awful on machines without much RAM due to it being ridiculously memory hungry. All 3 can be crippled by bad plugins, but it’s true to say I see more IE installs running like treacle due to the amount of crapware installed than I do the others. I suspect this accounts for the ‘IE is slow’ effect more than the actual browser performance.

      I also don’t see how you can call the user interface in IE frustrating unless you’re referring to the Metro UI, which is not a fair comparison. I get more frustrated by Ctrl+C randomly not working in Chrome than anything the others do.

      • QuickQuestion says :

        Firefox is an enigma. I’ve been using it since college (about 11 years now) and with a few versions its very fast, then it’s updated and slows down again. All of our machines have at least 2GB of RAM, most with 4, and Chrome seems to run very efficiently.
        I agree that bad plugins hurt IE but it doesnt seem to matter how much RAM a computer has, it always feels sluggish and clunky.

        • Nate says :

          This is a bit off-topic but how does your organization block explicit material, such as porn, from showing in Google Images? We have a URL filter that does a good job but it can’t filter out thumbnails that show up in Google Images. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

  4. Randy K says :

    Is number 2 an issue with Chrome? I haven’t installed Adobe Reader or other Adobe product from anywhere but Ninite.com is long time, so I wouldn’t know. I do remember iTunes was OBNOXIOUS about installing Safari and changing the default to Safari without any notice, which is another reason I love Ninite.
    I used Firefox when it came out of beta until Chrome was in beta and for personal use haven’t used anything since. Since I work in a large corp and a lot of the portals are only supported under IE 8 I use it as well everyday. IE has come a long way from IE6. I do a lot of side jobs and generally don’t move people off of IE anymore as it isn’t the large security risk it used to be.
    IE vs. Firefox vs. Chrome in my opinion is very much Windows vs. OSX vs. Linux, at this point all of them will get 99% of what most people need done, just different UI mechanics in some case.

  5. bennettblodinger says :

    Obviously not a normal user, but why I push Chrome out to my school:
    Group policy admx policies that are awesome,
    chrome://policy that is instant, Chromebook device management that is great.
    I also do like how it updates its core on its own without issue, but I can understand not looking it.

  6. Dangerous Dave says :

    In our area, number 1 reason for finding Chrome on a Windows install would be because our helpdesk tells them that’s the only browser that MS Office365 webmail works on . . .

    We’ve had issues with IE10 (no spell-checker), Firefox (no “send” button in compose window), and IE11 (Office365 says the browser is “unsupported” and refuses to load). It’s pretty weird (pathetic) that MS can’t even support it’s own products, on it’s own products.

  7. Michael says :

    No. 1565: The bureaucracy you work for is still running XP… on PCs almost as old.

  8. Wallace says :

    Angry that you post so rarely now. How have you become so mellow? Wallace.