Abhishek Chatterjee Online

The Chrome hype is already building up now, thanks to the 'G' string prepended. I have actually shoved Firefox aside in favor of Google chrome (though I am pretty sure I am gonna go back some time later).

The features/traits I loved about Chrome:

1. Extremely quick startup time - even beats IE
2. Drag and Drop file upload - wow what a relief!!!
3. Clean clutterfree UI
4. Most visited pages thumbnails on the startup page
5. Application shortcut creation e.g. Now Gmail has its own shortcut on the desktop

Things that I hated:

1. No Google Toolbar! What the bloody hell??? Google Chrome without Google Toolbar?? Above all, when I hit toolbar.google.com, it asks me to get Firefox!
2. A dedicated status bar is missing.


I guess the likes are more than the dislikes I could summon. I will want to stick to Chrome for some time.

Jeez I am glad I am in WindowsForms development, otherwise now developing Chrome loving websites is another headache! By the way did they create their own rendering engine or used/stole from Gecko?


09/05/2008 02:30

Well although so far so good. We are getting great free services from this company. But in this regard i would like to mention you the demat account case of Jodhpur.

Some photo studio's came up with this very kewl free trial scheme where you could get your free snaps taken and developed. Under this trial scheme, thousands of people exploited the scheme and got their snaps done. No one bothered to think why the shop was giving out free snaps and how it was making profit from it. Then only to realise one day that a scam had been uncovered, and their names and photos were used to register thousands of false demat accounts.

I am not saying google will exploit us that bad, but it can do some interesting stuff with it. It can become the bad medicine that Microsoft has become for us. We don't want to take it, but can't live without it.

After all if I have a business and I want to use a business email, why not buy an email account? Rather than relying on Gmail. You never know when Gmail decides that you have broken policies and shuts your account. Apart from that, you are simply handing over your personal data to gmail, which is surely not the best deed. (Since we have this quite infamous rumour that they don't delete a single mail that you recieve.)

Now we have this new service called Google Calendar, which seems just as dubious as its Gmail service. With being able to let others sync to our calendars, its a really innovative method of letting others know of your schedule so that they can adjust their schedules etc. Despite all the plus points it just moves one step closer to occupying every user's online life. I don't know about others, but I don't know why I would like people to know about my schedules. If they want to sync with me, they can always ask. What if I throw a private party to selected few, and one of those makes a Google calendar entry? I would face 'discrimination charges' from my all other contacts.
Apart from that, it has the wierd strategy of importing calendars. It allows you to import calendars from outlook, evolution etc, but not export back. Well that is fishy enough to discuss further.

I am fine with softwares like Evolution where I can do most of my day to day scheduling jobs. Some how I have been gripped by Gmail. I still can't figure out how to get rid of it. It's far more simpler to have a 3GB easily searcheable mailbox than burning your archived emails onto CD/DVDs (that i used to do earlier). However wonderful, I still find it a real risky business to deal with. I am still trying my best to get back to my previous routine.

In the end I would like the readers to rethink and decide the share of their lives that they would like to place in Google's hand.