Google released an upgrade to Google Earth the other week and today I finally had a chance to install it and see if it was any good.

A few people whom I have chatted with have said that 4.3 is much better than its predecessor but after having played around with it, my conclusion is that any changes are mainly cosmetic “under the hood” changes and it isn’t much to get excited about. Maybe it’s just me being cynical in my old age but nothing jumped out at me and screamed “WOW!”. In fact, I was left wanting the previous version back.

Google first of all claims that Earth 4.3 is faster and it’s true to a certain extent. But, I did notice some speed improvements but when 3D buildings were loading, Earth slowed down considerably, and on two occasions the application crashed.

Google also claims that you can access “hundreds of new 3D buildings in new cities”. But I noticed that many buildings that I liked to view in the previous Earth were gone! A lot of 3D buildings from my hometown were completely missing as well as a lot of 3D buildings from the United Kingdom and other European locations that I had previously liked to look at.

So instead of giving us “hundreds of new 3D buildings in new cities”, how about giving us back the ones we had already?

The swoop navigation controls are touted as allowing you to “fly seamlessly through the landscape” but in actual fact, I found them clumsy to use. The controls in the previous version were much easier to use whereas these ones are awkward and clumsy. They should rewrite it “fly awkwardly through the landscape and crash into trees”.

Plus, what is the point of giving us sunset and sunrise features? I fail to see the benefit of that.

Bring back the missing 3D buildings and the previous navigation controls and Google will have a cool application again. But right now I’m not sure what they have given us.

How do you feel about the new Google Earth? Excited? Disappointed? Indifferent?

If you want to try it out as well
Google Earth 4.3 is a free download via Google Pack: