Two Lessons from Google on How to Irritate Users — the Fiasco of Chrome’s Old and New Bookmark Manager

© 2015 Peter Free

 

13 May 2015

 

 

Google managed to irritate me twice this weekend — Firefox and Internet Explorer are looking better than before

 

Google is so dominatingly arrogant that it apparently does not care how many people it irritates in one swoop.

 

Chrome managed to lose all my bookmarks in one slip of the mouse button. And then — with my inadvertent help — ensure that they never came back. Afterward, it inserted a useless Bookmark Manager in the old one’s more useful place.

 

 

Woe is me

 

If you inadvertently delete the bookmarks folder in Chrome’s bookmarks bar and then accidentally — or “dumb as rocks” in my case — close Chrome, your thousands of favorites are gone forever.

 

Given that such slips of the finger occasionally occur, one would think that software designers of Google’s alleged caliber would have foreseen a way to get around it. But no.

 

To add insult, once I started over, Chrome inserted its relatively new Bookmark Manager into the system. Marking favorites became slower and less useful than before. I could not even alphabetize the bookmarks that I was tediously recreating.

 

As a result, I began using Internet Explorer and Firefox again. Chrome’s accumulated foibles and repetitive system lockups have gotten the best of me.

 

 

How to reestablish the alphabetize bookmarks function in the new Chrome

 

After some Internet searching, I came up with succinct and clearly presented advice from (ironically) a Scottish Episcopalian priest:

 

 

Gareth J M Saunders, Google Chrome’s awful new bookmark manager (and how to switch it off), View from the Potting Shed (19 April 2015)

 

I love some people’s affinity to Accurate Clarity, arguably a descriptive phrase for aspects of godliness.

 

 

The moral? — Google and Adobe do these things because they can

 

A new age of extortion, on one level or another. As with Adobe’s decision to force its users to pay substantial monthly fees to use most of the company’s products.

 

I hope the European Union slaps Google around. For principles’ sake.