This is a two-fer post — Wired Wednesdays plus some Comics are for Everybody action.
Because…
It’s a Beta version, and it’s only available for Windows for now. But still -
Google has a browser.
At home I mostly use a Mac, so (besides my undying allegiance to Firefox) I can’t actually play with Chrome. Until Google releases a Mac version. Cough cough coughity cough Google. (Oh, and also a Linux one please, k thx).
But what I can do is read their launch materials, which are presented in… wait for it… comic book form! Not just a comic book, but a Creative Commons licensed comic book put together by Scott McCloud, of Understanding Comics fame.
Ultimately I’m concerned about what this means for Firefox, since they receive a whole lot of their funding from Google — who pay for their search engine to be tied into the browser. Chrome’s release makes me worry that Firefox are now in danger of becoming an unnecessary line-item. But I am hoping that the little fox and the shiny hunk of metal will live happily ever after (together).
I don’t know if that story will come true, but you can read the Chrome story here.
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three comments
I have been reading about chrome and have heard some worrisome things. They are best summed up, I think, here:
http://theoblog.ca/serendipity/archiv...
What do you think? Are you ready to put your faith in Chrome?
Posted by Carolina
September 10, 2008, 10:36 PM
I have not been doing a lot of reading on Chrome, but it does seem like these early concerns (e.g. the suggestion data mining) are already being addressed.
E.g. Coderrr's "Google Chrome privacy worse than you think" (linked in the article you sent) has been edited with "oh no it isn't" updates.
Few other considerations:
* you can disable the suggestion feature
* they are changing the system to "anonymize all data collected from their suggestion services (including Chrome) after 24 hours"
* the code being open source, it's a lot harder for them to hide evil data-mining deeds.
That's the exact beauty of open source to me -- anyone who wants to can scrutinize it.
Don't know what's up with that Content license provision, but I don't think it's as nefarious as the author makes it sound. I'll look into it though...
Posted by Catherine
September 10, 2008, 11:25 PM
Hey Carolina --
Did some digging, and here's an explanation of that Content license provision.
It's just a "Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V" error -- a holdover from their generic legal terms.
As of Sept 3rd, Google corrected the Chrome End User License Agreement (EULA) to read:
"11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."
Problem solved.
You can verify the change in their EULA here.
Posted by Catherine
September 11, 2008, 11:06 AM
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