Take Google Chrome, for six years the browser of choice for your correspondent. It’s clean, fast and simple, yet increasingly it tries to second guess how I want to browse the web.

Now, fair’s fair, I may not have a typical browsing history: I spend one week a month in the UK offices of PC Pro, and the rest of the month in our French outpost.

Yet, it’s hard to see what business that is of Google. Or why it should decide to interfere and start presenting a host of content and features in French and refuse to switch back to English with the vigour of an agricultural blockade.

After a recent upgrade, Chrome on a main desktop PC in the office switched from driving on the left to driving on the right without a shrug in the way of explanation. It turned the URL search bar from useful feature to irritating deviation.

Chrome on a main desktop PC in the office switched from driving on the left to driving on the right without a shrug in the way of explanation

Instead of using the generic google.com as a default search engine, it switched to Google.fr, meaning all search results were skewed heavily towards sites from France and in French. Fine if you’re looking for information on the Cathar uprising or the perfect tarte tatin recipe, but France hasn’t made the greatest contributions to technology and the web.

After poking around in the browser’s help screen, there are options for forcing the browser bar search to revert to English results by default, but why would Google overide my original settings, when it knows, what with me being signed into Gmail, that by choice I use English?

If that’s as bewildering as a French supermarket’s opening hours, it gets worse. Chrome, apparently with no hint of irony, points out that the page delivering the results is in French and asks if I’d like to translate them into English. Genius.

Google knows I speak English. It’s there in Chrome’s language settings and over the years it’s developed a pretty good understanding of my browsing habits – how else would it know exactly which adverts to show me? — yet it insists on trying to push me into French options based on where I am browsing from. If Google knows where I buy my pants or go on holiday then it ought to know that I habitually surf UK websites.

Still, at least I speak French. Back in the UK for a week’s shift in PC Pro Towers, I performed a search at my parents’ home while signed into Gmail, and shortly after signing out realised that my parents’ edition of Chrome had now switched to French — and mother finds it hard enough to cope with technology without Google sabotaging her computer with foreign languages.

Google is by no means the only offender here, with an increasing number of companies defaulting from .com to the local suffix and language without obvious recourse  – but in a world that’s more mobile and more travelled than ever before, do we really need our technology telling us where we are?

As you may have heard, Google has its first shop-floor presence — not in California as you’d expect, but around the corner from PC Pro, inside PC World on Tottenham Court Road in London.

So this morning I wandered over to take a look and take some photos. Obtaining permission for this latter task from this particular branch of the PC World empire proved a challenge, but that left me lots of time to eavesdrop on customers trying out the web-only machines.

This first ever Google store — or Chromezone, as it’s called by them but never again by me — features a dozen devices, laid out on shiny blue curved counters, with oddly shaped stools to perch on while having a play. If this is Google’s answer to the Apple Store, or even the Microsoft Store, it needs a new designer. Not only did the space have the colour-theme of a child’s playroom, the lone staff member spent a fair amount of time wiping down fingerprints from the myriad shiny surfaces.

Aesthetic complaints aside, the shop-in-a-shop certainly drew attention from customers. And it’s a good idea: I doubt many of PC World’s usual shoppers would trade in a Windows laptop for a Chromebook without having a go on one first.

But down on the front line in the retail battle — as in, the shop floor — Google has handed the difficult task of explaining its revolutionary new device to one lone PC World staff member. The girl tasked with this in the TCR branch certainly knew her stuff, but what a hurdle to overcome.

One lady asked about using Office, and was given a wonderful sales pitch about Google Docs. Another wasn’t clear on the difference between 3G and Wi-Fi, and frankly, didn’t likely care. This is the web — it should just work, right? (Walking back, I reflected that the Kindle 3G is the only device, aside from smartphones and some tablets, to really get this always-on connection right; but apparently Amazon has now abandoned that, and is banning browsers from accessing the web via 3G on the new devices.)

Some customers clearly knew about the device, but still weren’t buying (not when I was there, at least). One asked if Chromebooks came with an Ethernet port, as his home Wi-Fi gets wobbly. Nope. He wandered off to the non-Chromezone (the rest of the store) and was last seen eyeing up Windows laptops.

When this poor sales girl’s colleagues need to make a sale, I’m guessing they get questions about the specs, battery life, price — easy questions to answer. The shoppers are already sold on the idea of a laptop. The Chromebook saleswoman needs to convince them to give up Windows and flip to the cloud, while explaining the finer points of connectivity, offline access and more before she’ll make a sale.

Google is right to get people looking at Chromebooks. PC World’s customers seemed excited to be looking at something new: some took photos, many sat down to try the Chromebooks out, and quite a fair few asked questions. But the potential deal-breakers in the product won’t be overcome by a bit of shelf space — no matter how many times you get staff to wipe the fingerprints off it.

The results proved shocking but, when it comes down to it, that software is pretty easy to deal with – it’s just a matter of uninstalling everything and, if you’re really particular, running an app like CCleaner to get your Registry back to its fighting weight.

Not so with smartphones. On Friday, I eased the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro from its box, turned it on, and was greeted with a message urging me to set up McAfee WaveSecure before I’d even set up the phone with my Google account.

Delving into the app drawer revealed more unwanted software, with a host of apps neatly summarising Android’s perennial fragmentation issues: alongside the official Market, the Xperia Mini Pro comes loaded with four different app stores. There’s also other McAfee apps installed as well as a Popcap Games trial and a selection of media management tools.

It’s not restricted to Sony Ericsson handsets, either. HTC’s often held up as the paragon of Android quality — alongside Samsung — but my own Desire HD is riddled with stuff that I simply don’t want: 3Mobile-TV, 3Musik and Planet3 were all installed alongside third-party apps such as Amazon MP3, Bebo, Bejeweled Deluxe and a demo of EA’s Sims 3.

Who’s responsible? Networks, largely, which receive clean handsets and then load them up with rubbish after signing deals with numerous partners. And it’s not like you can just get rid of this software, either — most of it’s there to stay, with hard-coded blocks in place to ensure you don’t uninstall any of the tat you don’t want.

There are ways around it, with rooting a possibility if you’d like an untarnished Android experience. Personally, I use a superb app called LauncherPro to kill two birds with one stone: it replaces HTC Sense with its own customisable home screen, and it also allows you to hide apps in your app drawer — the next-best option if I can’t uninstall.

Vodafone’s actions prove that smartphone bloatware can go very wrong, but other companies don’t seem to be learning lessons. Instead, this greed continues, and comes at the expense of Android’s reputation and, more importantly, the tarnished experience that users will have with their new phones — after all, this sort of thing doesn’t happen on iOS.

It’s much easier to use than many of its rivals, which are feature-packed but often fiddly. Open a page in Miren and it’ll default to its full-screen view – which automatically hides Android’s status bar, too – so you can take advantage of every one of your device’s precious pixels.

Navigation options are both useful and unobtrusive, hidden in the corners of the screen and fading from view if they’re not in use. The right-hand corner houses a button to open Miren’s address bar as well as a handy loading dial, and the bottom-left corner provides a back button. The top of the screen provides links to your tabs alongside a small symbol to open a new page.

Desktop-style features are present elsewhere to make life easier. Chrome users will be familiar with the eight thumbnail images of your favourite sites that appear on boot, and they’re present here, too, alongside links to your bookmarks, history and downloads. Those eight thumbnails can also be customised with links to either a selection of bookmarks or simply the sites you visit most.

Delve into Miren’s intuitive interface and more options become available. A small star beside the address bar lets you easily bookmark a page, and the address bar will bring up likely URLs and search suggestions once you’ve started typing – an invaluable feature that’ll be familiar to any Chrome or Firexox users.

The settings menu is divided into basic and advanced modes, with the former providing simple text side, image loading and cache-clearing options and the latter allowing you to delve into much more detail.

Flash can be disabled, for instance, if you’d prefer the full iPhone browsing experience, and a whole range of page zooming, pop-up blocking and encoding settings can be tweaked. Privacy and security options include clearing your cache, history, cookies and form data, and your passwords can be remembered or cleared with the click of a button.

Miren has options beyond those of other Android browsers, too. Your bookmarks and data can be automatically backed up to your phone and imported from your SD card, and the full-screen mode’s floating buttons can be deactivated or set to automatically fade from view if you’re not using them. There’s even a neat option to pause all downloads if you’re not longer using Wi-Fi, to ensure that you don’t incur high data charges. The only thing we’re missing, at least on the surface, is the option to enable desktop rather than mobile versions of sites.

It has almost all the options you’d want, packed into one of the best interfaces we’ve seen of any browser on the Android platform. It’s free, available right now and is our Android App of the Week – so what are you waiting for?

Want more great Android apps? Check out our previous Android Apps of the Week or read our 36 Best Android Apps feature

I’ve written in the past about my defection from Firefox to Chrome as my default browser, and was called everything from a “troll” to a “little bitch” for moaning about its increasingly slovenly performance and constant nagging.

Now, it appears even Mozilla’s friends are turning on Firefox. The browser’s co-founder, Blake Ross, was reportedly asked on a web forum whether he felt Firefox could maintain even double-digit market share over the next five years (it currently has around 25% of the worldwide market, according to Net Applications). He replied:

“I’m pretty sceptical. I think the Mozilla Organisation has gradually reverted back to its old ways of being too timid, passive and consensus-driven to release breakthrough products quickly.”

I make him right. It gives me no pleasure to lay into Mozilla – Firefox was my default browser for the best part of the last decade, and Mozilla engineers are among the smartest and nicest people I’ve ever had the pleasure to interview. But Firefox has lost it.

On the rare occasions I fire up the browser these days, it takes 30 seconds or so to get going, and then often needs a reboot once the various extensions have updated themselves. Admittedly, much of that delay is caused by me only opening the browser once a week instead of every day, meaning the updates arrive en masse, but it’s certainly no incentive to go back. Chrome never takes more than 10-15 seconds to get going, and is usually ready for action the moment I press the logo on the taskbar.

Mozilla Firefox also looks like a browser of yesteryear. That stolid grey chrome and old-fashioned menu bar look dated compared to Chrome’s clutter-free, blue interface. And although the performance difference is marginal compared to Internet Explorer, Chrome does have a clear advantage over Firefox on JavaScript-heavy web apps (most notably, of course, Google’s own).

It seems it’s not only me who has swapped Firefox for Chrome, either. The chart below shows the percentage of visitors to PCPro.co.uk using the two browsers. As you can see, Chrome has been rising steadily upwards to almost 14% of our visitors this month, while Firefox’s share has been eroded from a peak of mid-forties last summer to today’s share of 35%.

PC Pro visitors are by no means representative of the internet as a whole, but they are an excellent bellwether of things to come, with our early-adopter audience often reflecting trends that will soon become mainstream.

Unless Mozilla can pull something special out of the hat for Firefox 4 – and we’ve seen nothing revolutionary so far – Blake Ross’ prediction looks somewhat ominous.

Read Tim Danton’s sterling defence of Mozilla Firefox here

It’s so well regarded that some of the less well-written printer drivers suggest that you run it to clear up their mess when in the midst of a version upgrade. It’s also the proud holder of PC Pro’s Software of the Year 2008 award.

I am blogging this because Piriform commits a couple of very minor sins in the setup of the utility. One is that it tries to sneak the Yahoo toolbar in on you, unless you know to always untick the check-box; the other is that it’s king of the ultra-tiny version update. Only Winamp is worse, in my experience – hardly a week goes by without a new release, during which a moment’s inattention will land you back with the toolbar.

This may seem obsessive but I can’t be the only person who has seen people browsing on netbooks with upwards of six toolbars in Internet Explorer, and left with a browser window able to show about ten lines of text.

Anyway, Piriform has released a major update to CCleaner. It’s now on 2.22 and there’s support for cleaning out the Google Chrome cache and the Sun Java cache; just these two tricks alone are worth the clicks to get it.

The first design is fairly typical Firefox, with the tabs beneath the address bar (click to enlarge):

The Aero effect looks nice, and it’s a very clean interface, with only minor changes from the Firefox 3.7 concept images which Mozilla recently released. But there’s also a mockup with the tabs – unusually for Firefox – moved above the address bar:

I actually think it looks better that way, as the address/search bar to me is part of the tab I’m using, not a distinct element that works over all the tabs. But then I’m one of the few people who use Google Chrome as my main browser, and if you look at Chrome’s current design it’s easy to see why I like that Firefox layout.

Look familiar?

You can see more of the Firefox 4 mockups over on Mozilla’s wiki page, and there’s an interesting point near the bottom about the thinking behind some of the designs.

“I guess the idea of having a combined go/refresh button is good. It will help the users who are just switching from IE.”

I’ve been noticing for a while now that all the main browser designs seem to be converging, and this comment adds weight to that. If this is the way the designers are thinking, give it another year and Microsoft’s EU browser troubles will be irrelevant – they’ll all look the same.

The world’s favourite monopolist has launched a new “Get The Facts” campaign for Internet Explorer 8, that seems remarkably short on fact and a bit top-heavy on the codswallop.

You can see Microsoft’s version of the facts running down the left-hand side of the page, where the company has decided to compare Internet Explorer 8 against Firefox and Chrome. Yes, that’s right. Internet Explorer 8 wins in every single category, apart from a couple where it generously shares the honours with its rivals.

We could spend a couple of hours demolishing the argument for almost each and every one of those Microsoft ticks. Then again, we could spend a couple of hours shooting fish in a barrel or stealing sweets from children with only one arm, but we’ve got better things to do, so we’re just going to deal with the most blatant of Microsoft’s whoppers.

EASE OF USE

“Features like Accelerators, Web Slices and Visual Search Suggestions make Internet Explorer 8 easiest to use.”

No, they don’t. Take, for example, the very first search I typed into the search box (shown below).

Or go to the Weather from Bing Web Slice page and try adding to Internet Explorer and see what happens. When we tried we simply got a new window showing search results for the Weather in Brentford (we’re in central London), and no option to add a Web Slice whatsoever. Still, nice and easy, eh?

WEB STANDARDS

This one really takes the Chocolate Digestive. IE8 may finally be standards compliant, but only after a decade of Microsoft essentially dictating its own standards to web browsers. The ACID3 test is widely regarded as the most suitable test of standards compliance. On this test, IE8 scores  20/100,  Firefox 3 gets 72/100, and Chrome 2 scores a perfect pass with 100/100.

CUSTOMISABILITY

How Microsoft has the cheek to call this one as a score draw is astonishing. “Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but many of the customisations you’d want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 – right out of the box,” Microsoft claims. Really? I must have missed the IE8 feature that allows me to block out ads (such as Firefox’s Ad Block Plus) type browser commands in natural language (like Mozilla’s Ubiquity) or neatly collate and edit web pages for offline viewing (with the Scrapbook add-on).

COMPATIBILITY

“Internet Explorer 8 is more compatible with more sites on the Internet than any other browser.” Only because web designers have spent the past decade adapting their sites to Microsoft’s own warped idea of web standards. Plus, Firefox users can easily install the IE Tab Add-on for those increasingly rare sites that don’t work in Mozilla’s browser – which are largely Microsoft sites anyway.

PERFORMANCE

Microsoft dismisses as a “myth” claims that Internet Explorer is much slower than Firefox and Chrome. “A lot of Firefox and Chrome advocates like to cling to micro-benchmarking page load claims to measure browser speed. But in most cases, these differences can only be viewed by slow-motion video captures.”

Nonsense. As part of our review of IE8 we opened a 16-slide presentation in Google Docs. Chrome and Firefox took 19 seconds to start the presentation, IE8 took 33 seconds. You don’t need a slow-mo camera to catch that one.

VERDICT

Internet Explorer 8 isn’t a bad browser. For day-to-day surfing, it’ll probably be fine for the vast majority of people. But these vastly over-blown claims of world supremacy hand far too much free ammunition to Microsoft bashers.

Firstly, don’t be shy of removing all that crapware. Much as we all love to have our sparkly new laptops pre-filled with junk, it is worth going over the list of installed programs with a fine toothcomb to weed out the useless from the useful. Do you really need that Microsoft Office 60-day trial, or that 30-day demo of Norton AntiVirus? No, you don’t. And don’t forget to look through each icon in the system tray and ask yourself whether it’s ever going to come in useful. Trim the pointless items from your startup folder, or better still uninstall them completely, and your laptop will start faster than ever.

Now you’ve rid your laptop of all that awful rubbish, it’s time to put something far more useful on there instead. You don’t need to go splashing your cash about though, as there’s plenty of free software that does a sterling job.  

1.       Google Chrome – It’s not such a big issue with powerful laptops, but if you’re working with the more modest processing power of a netbook or ultraportable, we’d highly recommend installing Google Chrome. Whether it’s being run on a hulking desktop replacement or a lowly netbook, Google’s browser springs to life faster than any of its competitors. And, what’s more, its clutter-free display makes the absolute most of a netbook’s limited screen resolution.

2.       OpenOffice.org – Ok, so it’s not a patch on the refined beauty of Office 2007, that’s for sure, but it’s also quite a bit cheaper. With a price tag of exactly zero pence it’s difficult to argue with such a fully-featured, highly usable office suite. Download it now and do some work, you know you want to. 

3.       VLC Media Player  – Ready for the less dull, pedestrian moments in your laptop’s existence, there are few better media players than VLC. It’s the swiss-army-knife of media players, capable of playing pretty much any music or movie file you can feed it. You need never suffer Windows Media Player ever again. Hopefully.

4.       Live Mesh – If you’ve heard the Podcast in recent weeks, then chances are Tim, David or any number of the PC Pro team has wittered on about Microsoft’s latest wunderkind. What is it? Well, it’s online storage, essentially. Save all your documents and files to Live Mesh and then wherever you are, whether it’s at work, home or just at the local internet café, you can have access to the latest versions of your documents then and there via the power of the internet.

5.       Portable Apps – If you’ve got a big old hard disk in your notebook or netbook, then you probably don’t care about a few hundred megabytes here and there. But, if you’re struggling to get by on the handful of gigabytes offered by a tiny SSD then there is hope. Head on over to the Portable Apps website and you can download a range of free software which has been tweaked to run directly from a USB flash drive or memory card. Mozilla FireFox, Pidgin, VLC Media Player, 7-Zip, FileZilla and OpenOffice.org 3.0 are just a few amongst the many free software packages on offer.

6.       Avira AntiVir Personal  – When it comes to Anti-virus software, Avira’s AntiVir Personal is by far the best of the freebies. It does a good job of stopping all kinds of malware in its tracks, and isn’t too far off the protection of commercial products. The only niggle is the software’s insistence on nagging you to upgrade every time you download updated virus definitions – that’s just the price you’ll have to pay for being such a freeloading cheapskate. 

“There’s places in Eastern Europe, Indonesia, China where huge amounts of people are leap-frogging desktops altogether and going straight on to browsing on phones. In those places 2.5G is going to be around for a while, and it’s about giving them a choice.”

There’s something in this. I spent a year of my life living in China and the culture surrounding the desktop is very different to Europe. Chinese people get incredibly subsidised packages on mobiles, and the network charges are buttons. Computers, on the other hand, remain expensive. As a result there’s a huge swathe of people using their phones to browse, and not touching the desktop at all. When they do, it’s generally in internet cafes and for gaming, meaning the browser doesn’t get a look in. This is now a cultural thing, a way of seeing the desktop computer and its potential uses. It’s also unlikely to change in the near future.

Mateu argued, fairly convincingly, that the way around this was not to get hung up on desktops but to stick your browser on the things that are appearing in the living room. The Wii, the DS, the set-top box. In this scenario, the consequences for the browser are intruiging, because the key to making browsers work on these sorts of devices is to make them as abstract as possible. And therein, lays a problem. How do you build brand recognition for something that, if it’s working properly, will be basically invisible to the end user? 

Chrome is one of the first browsers we’ve seen that really pares back the browser. Google can get away with this, because it’s brand is already so strong. Also, because the browser isn’t the goal, it’ just a better method of serving its other products such as Google Docs. It wants to make you oblivious to the browser, but smaller names, such as Opera, can’t pull the same trick.

According to Opera’s web evangelist Bruce Lawson, the introduction of Chrome wasn’t something that caught it by surprise, nor something that it’s worried by: “The writing was on the wall when it started creating all those javascript heavy applications. People spend eight hours a day on the internet, but not browsing. They spend it on applications, and Google had to ensure they got the best experience on those applications…”

It’s strange to think that Opera isn’t actually fighting in the browser wars at all, it’s fighting its own very specific battles, against nobody at all. Just look at the big innovation in Opera 9.6, the “low bandwith” mode, which allows users to pick and choose which parts of an email or page to display. That’s clearly not aimed at Europe, or the West, it’s aimed at China, Indonesia, South Africa – lands of mass adoption but terrible connections. 

The majority of these users aren’t spending eight hours on Google Docs, they surfing on mobiles, or through the Wii. When Lawson says Chrome isn’t competing with Opera, I believe him, because I think where Opera is being succesful is in catering to those markets that seem niche to the western world. Lawson also reckons the IE development team are the worse drinkers on the circuit. I believe that, too.