I posted yesterday on Google's new browser named "Chrome". Today I have see a lot of news articles and blog posts about the browser. In general the feeling seems to be that the browser is fast, has a lot of good features, and is squarely aimed at taking market share from Microsoft. Not only will it hurt IE if Chrome gets a lot of play but it will also affect Windows as the browser will become the application platform.

There was a lot of talk about the EULA (you know the thing you never read but click the "I agree" button so you can get on with installing software). In particular the agreement granted Google a license to use anything you used in the browser. There was a wide range of reactions from "this is standard practice to keep Google from being sued, they would never use your stuff" to "that means they can capture and post the details of my on-line banking session to the world. I am deleting this as fast as I can". Whether they were intending to do anything with the data or not is unclear to me but in an article on arstechnica.com Google admitted it was a mistake and promised to change the license to retroactively not grant them any rights.

There is a bigger issue though and that is the Omnibox on each tab. The arstechnica article links to another article on cnet.com that states "Chrome's "Omnibar" can also access all keystrokes a user types, and Google will store some of this information along with IP addresses". This sounds like the kind of scenario I wrote about back in 2005 where AJAX is used to send your keystrokes to a server even if you don't ever actually hit the enter key. I have not found any mention of Google deciding to stop this practice in the future so I guess I will stay away from using Chrome until I have a better feel for what privacy I am giving up. I like the idea of having it suggest information to me, I just don't want Google storing that information.

Read the complete post at http://www.grokdev.com/Blogs/scott/2008/09/04/FollowupOnTheGoogleBrowserChrome.aspx