I’ve been using Chrome for a few days now, and something’s been bugging me about it. Nothing immediately obvious, just a vague sense of something being not quite right. Then, as I was tromping into work this morning, munching on bacon sandwich, I finally put my finger on it. What’s bothering me, is that I can’t believe Google made this.

Don’t get me wrong, Google’s muddy size twelves are all over it. The simplistic interface, the lashings of space, and of course, the brilliant search. What’s been bothering me are the flourishes. The transparency when you drag a tab into a window, the fading task bar, the slide away tabs, the cute animations. Chrome is by far and away the prettiest browser doing the rounds, but pretty is not something I associate with Google -which to my mind has always been the most utilitarian company out there.

Look at Google Apps and their “designed by a bricky” interface. It does the job, but nobody’s ever going to murmur sweet nothings in its ear over a nice white wine. Google Mail suffers the same syndrome. It’s undoubtedly a great laugh down the pub, but if my mates saw me with it I’d be slaughtered.

And suddenly here’s Chrome. It could, of course, just be a reaction to existing uggo browsers, a nice way of differentiating itself from its competitors. But a part of me thinks that while Google publicly denies it’s working to usurp the OS with the browser, this new focus on aesthetics suggests otherwise. Apps don’t particularly have to be beautiful, as long as they work. These days, however, operating systems do. It’s a selling point, and one embraced with gusto by Apple, Microsoft and, lately, Linux.

To my mind, Google is getting ready to quite litterally blue the line between browsers and operating systems. Either that, or its finally hired somebody with taste.