There are any number of larger subjects we should be talking about today, but it’s late on a Friday and I’ve been doing too much project work to finish the pieces in the hopper. So instead this will serve as the traditional Friday grab bag, but with a twist: it’s all about Google gripes this week.
As the just launched Google Dashboard reminds me, I use a large number of Google products. Some more actively than others, but it’s not a stretch to say that a great deal of my personal and professional lives is managed by the Big G. In general, this approach works well, because Google is probably the most platform agnostic of the technology providers we could use, and at any given time I may be accessing my data using one flavor of Linux or another, versions of Windows back to 2000, Mac OS X or its close cousin, the iPhone.
Occasionally, however, Google’s products frustrate me. All software has bugs, of course, but the three that follow happen to be particularly irritating.
Chromium Crashes
To be fair to Google, while the builds of Chromium are not deemed production quality, it remains the fastest and lowest UI footprint browser available. For the time being, I’ve mostly cut over to using it as my primary browser, although I still spin up Firefox a half dozen times of day when Chromium misbehaves. And it definitely misbehaves.
One of Chromium’s much appreciated features is its tab-per-process model, which attempts to ensure that a single locked up tab doesn’t bring down the entire browser around it. For the most part, this works as promised. One of the things I’ve been seeing more of, however, is cascading failures amongst tabs. For example, Chromium seems to really dislike Google Reader – ironic, I know – as well as a few of the blogs I follow like The Big Lead. Opening a link to that site, for example, will not only return an Aw Snap (pictured) for that page, but for the originating Google Reader tab as well as every other page I’ve opened from the aggregator.
Whatever happened to tab isolation?
Google Profile
This one is the simplest problem, but it is, frankly, driving me absolutely bonkers. Mostly because I don’t appear to have any real recourse. Google Profiles assures me that I “can control how [I] appear in Google by creating a personal profile,” but I can’t. Really. As you can see from the screenshot above, not only is the picture of me old, Google Profiles crushes it so that I appear approximately a foot wider. Not a good look.
So I tried to change it. Google Profiles dutifully allows me to upload a new picture, crop the portion that I want, and save the change. It will then use the new picture for some undetermined amount of time – at least an hour, as far as I can tell – after which it will silently revert back to the picture you see above. Also known as the picture I’d like to replace.
What can I do about this? Well, changing it multiple times doesn’t work: I’ve switched it to the new picture at least a half dozen times, to no avail. The Help link isn’t one.
Anyway, I might as well document it here just so that you’re aware that I’m not actually five and a half feet wide, no matter what Google Profiles tells you.
Mobile Gmail
One of the things I’ve consistently appreciated about Google’s messaging – the email/calendaring/etc kind, not the PubSubHubbub kind – solutions has been their unwavering support for HTML interfaces for mobile devices. While many of Google’s competitors delivered J2ME clients or RIM specific solutions, Google instead delivered an interface for the masses: basic HTML that would render even on the not-so-smart smartphones I had prior to getting an iPhone.
More recently, they rolled out a elegantly reskinned and HTML5 based version of the mobile interface, which had a few issues at launch and hasn’t gotten much better.
While I haven’t had a repeat of that issue – which resent a specific email every time I logged into the client – I have been having an increasing volume of errors that require the deletion of the mobile Gmail database. Specifically, I open the client and watch it freeze as above; the gear icons just spin endlessly, never returning the Inbox. This can’t be attributed to poor network conditions, because at the same time I’m able to visit other sites and even other Gmail based inboxes. This would indicate to me that it’s a specific problem with the local database. And indeed, when I have this problem, and go into Settings:Safari:Databases and delete the database in question, all is well again. The Inbox pops up normally and with no issue.
If this happened infrequently – say once a month – I wouldn’t think much of it. But between my various Gmail accounts, it’s probably happening once a week – once every two weeks at best. Which isn’t good. I’m certainly not going to switch from Google because of it – worst case I could just use the IMAP client – but it’s certainly a negative experience.
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