Wow, I’m kinda floored by how awesome Google’s new browser, chrome, is.
I’ve wondered how long it was going to take for Google to enter the browser market, what with their spiders, and their data tracking that they already do, not to mention their robust analytics, etc. While I have my beefs with Google Ads (do yourself a favor: don’t use them unless you don’t mind having them yanked out from under you even if you follow the EULA to the letter), for the most part, Google provides some incredible services at an even better (free) price.
What I think I like the most about chrome is the simplicity of it. Like all Google products, the design is always functional, never about the form, and yet, they still accomplish an incredibly clean aesthetic with all the features you didn’t even know you wanted.
If you haven’t tried it yet, do yourself a favor and have at it.
This is pure design elegance. It’s how browsing the internet was meant to be.
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Did you read the EULA?
Besides the usual privacy concerns with Google products, which get worse the more services you use Google for, they have doozies in there.
“By submitting, posting, or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.”
Now, I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not exactly sure what that allows Google to do, but to me that sounds like any web page you go to, anything you do on that page, anything you type into that page, Google can now use for it’s own “marketing”. That will probably mean that the browser will be completely banned internally at most companies.
Even for regular users, the more data that Google has, the more you have to worry about what abuses could happen from that information. Google hasn’t done anything really evil yet, that I know of, but what about in the future? The company will always act the way it does now? Not likely, based on other companies.
Even more important is that the government can get that information with a subpeona. Previously, the restrictions on the government were pretty good, but now with all the loopholes because of bad “terrorist” law, you can’t trust the U.S. law. What about if their servers get hacked? Etc, etc.
For the record, I use google search all the time, but I also clear my caches and cookies regularly. I use GMail, but that’s because I know that any email should be considered public information. But I’m not going to use Chrome, the features aren’t worth it, and Firefox already does a fine job.
The ToS on Chrome is clearly a copy/paste job that someone botched. That section is standard boilerplate they use on their other services (google apps, appengine, etc).
They’ve already announced they’ll fix the Chrome ToS and retroactively apply the new terms.
…and if anyone were worried about what other evil Google might cook up — just grab a build of Chromium (the open source project Chrome is built on). That code is under the BSD license and the builds don’t/can’t carry any ToS.
Yeah, they replied to the ToS concerns and basically said “oops, our bad.” I do a lot of internet application heavy stuff and Chrome is miles above IE and FF as far as performance. I’ve given up on FF3 and will probably revert to 2 when I start running Linux again barring a build of Chrome for Linux.
I definitely think someone needed to rebuild a browser from the ground up. IE and FF are too caught up trying to keep outdated standards in their browser and add too many bells and whistles that I just don’t need. I’d rather have a fast browser than the “awesome bar.”
I guess I’m the only person in the world Chrome crashes on :( Every time I open many (ie 5-10) tabs it crashes!!!
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