[Discuss] What goes around, comes around

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Richard Pieri)]

There is a truism: users don't love your software. It doesn't matter
what that software is: a web browser, a media player, file sync,
anything. Users don't love your software. They tolerate it. And they
will abandon it when they find something that's just 1% better than what
you offer, or you do something that makes your software 1% worse than
your competition.

By mid 2009 I'd finally gotten annoyed enough at Firefox's growing bloat
to take a look at the new hotness: Google Chrome. It had its problems
but it was that 1% better in a way that counted: speed. And then Google
got bookmark sync working without relying on third party extensions. I
said g'bye to Firefox and things were good.

Until last month. In their infinite wisdom, Google has decided to ignore
various OS vendors' UI guidelines in the menu structures. Instead of
using the menu systems provided by the vendors they wrote their own. One
that looks and acts like it does on touch-screen Android devices. Even
when running on other, not touch screen systems. And then they removed
the command line switch that reverted Chrome back to the traditional
menu style. There are flags that are supposed to disable the
touch-centric UI. They've been there since the style change. They don't
work, not in dev channel, not in Canary, and not even in last night's
Chromium build. To top it off, all of the bug reports, all of the
complaints, all of the feedback that I've found have been closed with
the comment "WontFix".

So, as of today, I've switched back to Firefox because it's 1% and then
some better than Chrome in a couple of ways that matter. It doesn't
screw with OS interface elements like Chrome does. It handles multiple
profiles more elegantly than Chrome does. It has built-in bookmark sync
that WORKS WITH MY OWN SERVER.

Bonus: that sync server also works with SeaMonkey.

-- 
Rich P.