‎Google Chrome

This app is wonderful for use anywhere you’re roaming, what with syncing data and keeping bookmarks organized between devices. That’s honestly not difficult; the difficult stuff, however, is what I need for this and other mobile browser apps to perform, like dropping a cached file with greater ease or refreshing a simple update on a style sheet. The fact this and other browser apps don’t extend developer tools to their mobile apps is a MAJOR series of demerits that takes what COULD be a four or five-star app and significantly diminishes it. If you’re not a developer, it won’t matter to you, but I’ve grown EXHAUSTED with constantly wiping EVERYTHING to to get a minor refresh, and shame on Google for not making strides — 15 years into the mobile revolution — to make that feature a part of this app.

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.

It lets me sync my bookmarks with my laptop (on which I also use Chrome). That’s a nice feature. But it’s so mind-blowingly awful with privacy that I’ve deleted it from all mobile devices. iOS Chrome is completely lacking in every basic privacy control one would expect of any browser built after 2014.

This thing doesn’t just track and save everything you do; it presents a list of all recently-visited sites any time you open a new tab… and there’s no way to opt out of this or turn it off. You can’t even delete in bulk; you have to remove these recently-visited sites one by one unless you’re willing to clear your entire browser history.

The new tab also automatically loads a selection of news stories, and there’s no way to turn off that feature. It’s like logging onto AOL circa 1996.

Sure, you could use incognito mode, but it shouldn’t be an all or nothing choice. If I want to have my cookies and history saved without my search history being immediately presented to anyone who picks up my iPad, that should be an option.

(And why, when visiting Google sites, does it assume I want to use the most recently added Google account used in my Gmail app? Wouldn’t it make more sense to assume I’m using the default/primary one if it’s going to autofill the login screen? And why make it so difficult to log out so that I can log in to the proper account?)