Well for anyone who regularly uses YouTube you'll realise that recently it's been trying its hardest to get everyone into installing Google Chrome.

Well firstly I was reluctant (since I've already had enough of Google setting all my defaults to 'Yes I love Google' because I don't, I can't stand Google. But either way I need to try it out I guess so here's what I thought of it.

Before I even downloaded it I had second thoughts, this is a browser and that means it's going to try its hardest to be like Firefox which is still the god of browsers, and whenever you download a new browser you need to get used to the way in which it ruthlessly treats all the form controls differently and lays things out in its own retarded way, not to mention how all browsers try their hardest to either make you download fifty different toolbars at once or make the browser your default before you've even tried it. Google Chrome is no exception to these browser stereotypes.

The website tries to sell this browser at first with speed, it shows us a nice simple yet artistic shot of the window (which I'm not going to deny is pretty) and tells us its fast, reliable and takes seconds to download and install. Heh. I've never seen that with anything before and Google Chrome was blatantly lying. Scared but determined to actually try it out, I gritted my teeth and made my way into the painful world of Google's software shots.

It did only take about 5 minutes to install, so I'll give it that it isn't FSX in installing, but 5 minutes is about 300 seconds, and that isn't what I'd call 'just seconds' because Sparta would've something to say about that. It helpfully put a shortcut to it on my Desktop and Quick Select, both of which I promptly told to get the fuck away from and shot at it with my shotgun pointer until I found the 'del' key. It did add it to all the other 'Google' programs' folder in my Start Menu All Programs thingy so it got that bit right. I then opened it up to see (surprise, surprise) more attempts at setting Google defaults.

I'm going to skip through all this importing settings and setting default search providers crap because no matter where you go they'll never go away and you already know enough about them. After 15 minutes of this rubbish I opened up the browser properly this time and it looked good; nice and simple. And that's great, there aren't enough simple browsers and they're all too loaded up on toolbar speed to know how to look simple anyway, but Google Chrome is simple. Fast? No, not fast. Google Chrome is one of those sneaky programs that looks simple but is actually doing loads of useless things in the background, and most likely it's designed for Vista computers, which are dead fast with more processors than you can shake a stick at. You wouldn't notice the strain that Google Chrome provides, mainly because Vista's already taking up a whole half of your resources. On XP (which is what I use) the Google Chrome makes my PC considerably slower, something which Mozilla Firefox doesn't do, even with all the extra buttons. I've noticed the artistic approach to Google Chrome is to make it look like Vista across all the OSs, so that means it's a bit like Media Player 11 just less shiny.

In fact, I was surprised at how incredibly plain and unshiny it was, considering the name 'Chrome' would suggest a shiny look to the new browser.

I started to add my Home Page and then I realised they'd made the same mistake as Mac, they'd actually stripped out all the useful buttons in trying to make it simpler, and even the really simple 'Use current' button to the Home Page control section had been removed, the one that I'd painstakingly prepared for and taken for granted.

So there's hardly any features apart from tabs, they've taken away so much from a standard browser that it's obscenely difficult to use, and it's an ugly and overcomplicated approach to all the other Firefox clones. Well I'm not using it. There's not a single advantage to using this apart from the dictionary for text-boxes which comes pre-installed, and not even that works (it doesn't even recognise the word 'Google'. On the plus it's free I guess, but then there's not a single browser that isn't.

There you have it, my overall rating for this software is a 3/10, which translates as 'Go home and don't try to do it again' in a way which is far more reliable than Google Translator.

3/10

###-------