Well Thumbed

I’ve finally managed to download and install Google’s shiny new browser, Chrome. Well, in all honesty, I actually downloaded it and installed it last week but running proved slightly more tricksy

I can forgive the problems I had with the page simply not executing the download. After all, most of the geek population would have been furiously downloading the suspiciously Opera-like application at the same time and it’s not like Google’s infrastructure can handle all that load. Oh, wait…

I can also forgive the all the security exploits that have been recently noted. The application *is* in beta and I know of other applications that have had worse issues on the first beta release. Hell, some of them are “Production ready” and they’re still throwing up really embarrassing errors.

The annoying thing is that when I first installed it, I got an application error. A big old “The application failed to initialise properly. Click OK to terminate the application” with a cutesy little sad face in the browser. Well, what a letdown! After a good few minutes of bitching about Chrome with the rest of the team, I left the install to die quietly on my machine, relegated to that usage status of “never” in the Control Panel, and cultured a mild dislike of Google’s application development standards. I’ll spare you my rant on acceptance criteria, quality expectations and deliverable reviews for now.

However, all is not lost. Apparently all one needs to do to resolve this is append “–no-sandbox” to the application path when you’re launching it. For example, C:\Users\yourName\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe –no-sandbox for Vista and C:\Documents and Settings\yourName\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe –no-sandbox for XP.

Well, that was simple. Why on earth didn’t I get that in the first place?