Google Chrome: NSFW

[fj]

In an attempt to simplify the browser, Google Chrome, released yesterday, has done away with the homepage. This is quite the break with tradition, about a decade of it, so it should not be done lightly. Google has replaced it with a page that shows the thumbnails of your most visited pages, and lists of recent bookmarks.

This has advantages: it simplifies configuration, it gets you faster to not one but multiple frequent destinations, it removes a concept that is difficult to explain to newbies. Alas, it also really exposes your personality, and that can be unwelcome.

The workplace is a social location that, like all social locations, has norms and rules. You are supposed to be 'professional' there, whatever that means this week. In the USA and other countries, one of the norms includes not creating a 'sexually hostile' workplace, or a workplace that is offensive, demeaning, or otherwise exclusionary of the vast breadth of personal histories that talent comes in. We all have to work together, and it currently means we leave our personal lives behind. Certain aspects of you do not belong in the workplace.

We skirt around that, web wise; after all even at work we have a life to lead. Some windows and tabs on browsers are open but hidden, ready to check when nobody is behind us.And certainly at home we live out our full lives, which for adults includes adult themes. So maybe on weekends or at nights you do browse adult sites, or have a contantly refreshing messaging window open for adult websites. Maybe you use adult web chat facilities. Maybe you browse highly graphical sites, maybe not even about sex but about other topics that are nobody's business at work. And that is fine because you are at home.

But if, like me, you are a freelancer who has to bring in his own laptop for work. And so, if I were using Google Chrome, when I had to present something that required opening a new tab, oh god. 9 thumbnails of the sites you visit a lot in the evenings and weekends. Bad enough when you are showing results to a manager, now imagine when doing a presentation for a group with your 9 thumbnails showing up on a projection screen. At a conference. This is already bad enough when typing in the URL bar starts showing a history of where you browsed, but quick typing can make that go away. Those thumbnails show up really fast when you open up a new tab; Chrome was made to be quick.

Chrome does has a Incognito mode: you open a new window from the menu in Incognito mode, and then whatever you do there will have no influence on your history, cookies, or other temporary files the browser uses. So all the sites you open up in that special window will not show up in the thumbnails of the regular window. Still, taking out the Home Page to make things simpler now has had the effect that the user actually has more to keep track of: what should be opened in a normal tab and what in an Icognito tab. So now even at home I have to worry about what work will say about my browsing.

No thanks.

Crossposted to TST.com which I will stop doing as soon as I have backported the last LJ entries and can make a syndication feed.

Comments

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

Whatever happened to Google's whole "don't be evil" thing? Or is this just poor thinking, not actual evil?

[fj.livejournal.com]

But harder concept to grasp than those auto-thumbnails.

[theoctothorpe.livejournal.com]

Don't forget that this "smart homepage" is something that Opera has had for awhile. It's a great *idea*, but yes, as you point out, has obvious flaws.

Also... no traditional bookmarks, you invoke them by typing the name of the site… if I could remember that, I wouldn't bookmark it!

[fj.livejournal.com]

Then they really should have known better. It is so glaring, that problem is the first things I though of when I read the comic even before screenshots or downloads. And then I started it and visited clubmuscle and bmb and bmleather first, and now those thumbnails are there.

[theoctothorpe.livejournal.com]

Also, as far as the UI is concerned, Tabs at the top? WTF?

Their "excuse": We want Chrome to be more of a shell into the internet, than a browser, so we want it to behave more like an application.

Well, 1) a browser *is* an application, and de facto, it's a shell into the internet, as most people think the web == the internet 2) Which OS uses tabs in that way? If they want it to be "more native" as they imply, why do they make this so unconventional? Besides, the concept of the tab kinda sucks when you have things like a sidebar with a thumbnail view of the webpage (as seen in safari (w/ STAND), firefox, camino, omniweb, etc)

This UI metaphor stinks of Raskin

[fj.livejournal.com]

Only if Mozilla is throwing sketches over the wall to Google.

[vasilatos]

Why NSFW? I think you're being a little cranky, but I do love your analytical mind.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

It's not that the post is NSFW, he's saying Google Chrome itself is :-)

[vasilatos]

Then it shouldn't be in the header where people are deciding whether to click, and it is in the explanatory text, where the whole question is elucidated.

[fj.livejournal.com]

Guaranteed people will click to read it then.

[vasilatos]

Worked on me. :-)

[fj.livejournal.com]

Because showing sex or adult sites is the definition of Not Safe For Work, and every time I open a new page in Chrome it shows immediately thumbnails of sites like that that I visited the most on my off time. If I had to go to a client site tomorrow with Chrome, I'd be in trouble.

[vasilatos]

But your post doesn't do any of that.

[folk.livejournal.com]

Eh, I tried it out today and you can turn the preview windows off. I bet that doesn't stop it keeping your data, but still, it does stop inadvertent showing-off of my, er, evening-and-weekend-reading.

That said, almost without fail whenever I'm using my home laptop at work, I log into a separate user, one with a different background. Nobody needs to know that I use VLC and Skype and Adium enough to keep them in my dock, for a start.

[fj.livejournal.com]

you can turn the preview windows off

I didn't look through setting enough, but "ye shall know the quality of design by the defaults set." This default made me wonder just how much time these designers ever spend outside the Googleples, or just how broadminded Google is.

[folk.livejournal.com]

Quite. Maybe the Googlese aren't allowed to take their work computers home ever, so all work on two computers without overlap.

[seat.livejournal.com]

If google allowed the configuration option such that a 'New Tab' page opened to a traditional homepage vs. the current Opera-inspired multi-page view, would you change your 'No Thanks' stance to 'hopeful?'

[fj.livejournal.com]

Well, the second issue is that I do not see the point of Chrome. Yet. I am afraid the point is mostly for Google, though.

[seat.livejournal.com]

YMMV, here is their marketing spin youtube. If nothing else, Brian Rakowski (around 0:40) is nice to look at :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGmO7Oximw8

There are benefits for Google to build their own browser much like the majority of technology platform creation strategies. But, you know this already.

Regarding the second issue, it always strikes me oddly somehow when people are resistant to events which increase entropy in the market place. I would ask the same question when Firefox arrived on the scene. Why pick Firefox over IE? That question has been answered many times.. security, robustness, speed. Same potential song, different verse.

As a friend recently said however, "One person's perfect environment is another man's panopticon" It'll be interesting to see how well people adopt the application... I mean browser.

PS: Hello and hi. Your posts about working/living in multiple cities has been very fascinating!

[thespisgeoff.livejournal.com]

Seeing how quickly the main page populated with various NSFW sites after I played with it a bit last night made me...a little uncomfortable.

I guess the Internet is for porn.

It's a pretty neato trick; I just have to very quickly make all of my "frequently visited" sites political blogs.

[urbear]

It's trivial to change Chrome's behavior to open the home page on startup; it's the first thing you see in the preferences dialog. Not so trivial, however, is persuading it to do that when you open a new tab... I can't see any way of preventing those porn-laden thumbnails to appear. Google needs to provide a way to turn that off.

Bookmarks? They're all there and used in the usual way; hit the star in the address bar to create a bookmark, get to them via the bookmark bar (if it's not already showing, hit Ctrl-B or click the tools icon and tell it to always display the bar).

[pinkfish.livejournal.com]

I just noticed that the link to TST in this post is broken.

Other posts are fine.

[fj.livejournal.com]

I do them all by hand. I'll fix this.

[raimondas.livejournal.com]

I still don't understand the whole hoopla about Chrome. So ... Google released a browser... like 8 years too late to be excited about or talked about... yawn... why would I even bother downloading it?

[(Anonymous)]

Try deleting "C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Thumbnails". I transferred my profile folder from another computer, but the thumbnails were broken. Deleting the thumbnails file didn't fix it. I still see the titles, though.

Chrome is faster than Firefox, but not as crash-proof as IE8. Firefox is featureful but restoring from a crash is terribly slow because it throws away the cache.

-Cybrr