Google Chrome, Day 2

Seems that almost every story submitted to Slashdot last night in some way involved Google's Chrome that we started talking about yesterday. Dotan Cohen noted that according to Clicky Chrome has hit 3% browser share. Since Google has decided to release Chrome only for Windows, I now share for you 3 reviews written by others: the first comes from alexy2k, the second from mildsiete, and the third from oli4uk. They all seem to feature various opinions, charts, and screenshots demonstrating various exciting points.

Comments

Chrome is spyware!

[Anonymous Coward]

Install it and 'Google Update' is silently installed along with it with no apparent way of turning it off besides regedit/msconfig. So much for "Don't be Evil".

Google spying on you

[edelholz]

Apparently, every installation of Chrome gets an unique id (sorry, German only) and, once you've signed into your Google account ONCE, the unique id gets connected with your account and you'll always be traceable back to your Google account, even if you're not logged in.

That's a showstopper. But I'm hoping for a spy-free version to be out soon, the beauty of open source!

Re:Google spying on you

[Simon (S2)]

I posted this earlier today, but I feel I have to post this again, as it is really important people know what they get in to using this browser:

In metrics_service.cc [chromium.org]
it sends everything you do in the toolbar to
static const char kMetricsURL[] =

        "https://toolbarqueries.google.com/firefox/metrics/collect";
It collects everything and sends it to google servers, on startup and on shutdown.

// Ongoing log typically
// contain very detailed records of user activities (ex: opened tab, closed
// tab, fetched URL, maximized window, etc.) In addition, just before an
// ongoing log is closed out, a call is made to gather memory statistics. Those
// memory statistics are deposited into a histogram, and the log finalization
// code is then called. In the finalization, a call to a Histogram server
// acquires a list of all local histograms that have been flagged for upload
// to the UMA server.
//
// When the browser shuts down, there will typically be a fragment of an ongoing
// log that has not yet been transmitted. At shutdown time, that fragment
// is closed (including snapshotting histograms), and converted to text. Note
// that memory stats are not gathered during shutdown, as gathering *might* be
// too time consuming. The textual representation of the fragment of the
// ongoing log is then stored persistently as a string in the PrefServices, for
// potential transmission during a future run of the product.

WHAT THE FUCK. Keep ff ftw.
If your privacy means nothing to you just use Chrome.

local anecdote

[pohl]

In my office, there are several windows developers who were excited to try Chrome yesterday - one enthusiastically declaring that he was going to uninstall his other browser as soon as he got home. What struck me about this is that these are people who would never, in a million years, lift a finger to try Safari/Windows - yet here they are drooling over how snappy a WebKit-based browser is. The prospect of increased WebKit adoption makes me happy.

Re:local anecdote

[Zoidbergo]

I would characterize Chrome as "Safari for Windows done right."

There were massive mistakes Apple made (out of arrogance or incompetence, I'm not sure), when releasing Safari for Windows:

- Apple style Font rendering. Having to switch your eyes between Safari's anti-aliasing and ClearType on a regular basis starts to hurt your eyes, one seems blurry in comparison to the other.
- Safari didn't follow many of the standard windows app behaviors, another snafu. You can't stuff OS X app behaviors down the throats of Windows users, and vice versa.
- It also had an incredibly slow startup time. (Although it would render extremely fast)

Contrast this to Chrome, which renders text using ClearType and windows font rendering, behaves like a windows app, starts up really fast.

It's not even like I'm bashing Apple for a bad port. iTunes for windows was ported really well, it follows (for the most part, except menus) the windows UI conventions and font rendering, so it feels more like a Windows app.

(By the way, I'm primarily a Mac user and use Safari regularly on the Mac)

Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome

[teh kurisu]

You obviously missed Chrome's, which never writes that private information to your hard drive in the first place. Much more secure. Safari also does this, has done for a while.

Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome

[rsclient]

Actually, no, it started much earlier than that :-)

Once upon a time, they made "web browsers". Well, actually, no, what they made was hardware: a hunk of electronics, a keyboard, and a CRT (like a monitor from the days before LCDs). And they called them "terminals", and wired them to the computers. And the software on the computer would sniff the terminal to figure out what type it was so that the correct HTML (I mean, "escape sequences") could be sent. Esc [ 4 m, for example, was "bold". Esc [ 0 m meant make it plain again.

Only it turns out there was one popular terminal, the VT100 from the ever-present Digital Equipment Corporation ("DEC". Later they called themselves "Digital"). (Only it wasn't actually popular; the actual popular version was the VT102). So every minor terminal maker -- and there were hundreds -- would lie, and claim to be a VT100.

How do I know this? Because I worked on RS/1, an interactive statistical package and had to support those hundreds of terminals. And what a pain it was.

Re:Incognito mode actually isn't really so...

[E IS mC(Square)]

Google still has your browsing history nicely tracked, stored on their computer, available for subpoena etc.

Do they say that in that link you provided? In fact, the link says something opposite. And they make it pretty clear what is sent to Google, when and how to disable it.

If you want to continue with FUD, that's fine by me, but you can help yourself by not weakening your own arguments.