Google Chrome 17+

I’ve been using the mobile version of Chrome ever since it came out. I loved it! It was always super quick, it was familiar and easy to use, and you can use your plugins with it.

It wasn’t until recently when things went downhill. There are so many bugs with it now, and some that have been there for literally half a year that have been left unaddressed. From a massive company like Google, you’d think they try to fix these issues, right? Well, if I rotate my phone, the window just will not work for me. It will shrink the size and just be incredibly frustrating to use. This bug has been with me since SEPTEMBER of 2020. Four months this issue has been here, and the Chrome forum/FAQ is reporting the same issue. It has not been fixed, and I feel like they haven’t even attempted to fix it. I had to move back to Safari because it’s just not full of bugs and issues.

I really like Chrome for a lot of reasons, but when bugs and other issues have been left unfixed for this long, it’s just not worth my time anymore. Once these bugs are fixed, this will be back on top, but in the meantime, I’d recommend to not waste your time and energy using this browser.

Chrome is great for everything and works across all my devices so it’s nice but the app recently changed one of their buttons and is making it a hassle to use. The center button at the bottom of the screen used to pull up the search bar a the keyboard which made it easy instead of having to reach to the top of the screen to tap the omnibar to start searching. It is now a new tab button that is really frustrating as I instinctively tap that button when I pull up a new tab. So now I have to close the second new tab and then tap the omnibar at the top of my iPhone which has a pretty lengthy screen. A bit of a regression in terms of user friendliness so I’m writing this in hopes of them changing the button back or at least giving us the option to choose what the button does.

I really wanted to like the Chrome app for iOS but it turned out to be counter productive. I use a lot of other Google apps over Apple (notable Gmail and Google Maps) and after a lot of prompting from those apps to use Chrome when pushing to Safari, I decided to give it a try. After a month of Chrome usage, the app options, gestures, buttons are counterintuitive and slow. For example, I understand some people like to close their browsing session after but I never do- sure, have a close all button but why is it displayed so prominently in the app start. I have pressed it accidentally so many times and closed out my plethora of tabs which is really annoying. There’s no way to recover them if you open a new tab. There’s no option for opening tabs in background, quick new tab from a current tab just to name a few others. Page loading is slowing and constantly reloads instead of saving page data. The iOS Chrome app needs a major refresh and update before I use it again. But right now it is counterintuitive, inefficient, and unproductive.