Unbeknownst to me, whilst I was writing the Chrome post last Wednesday afternoon before flying off to Swtizerland for a weekend of climbing, a storm was brewing over the terms of the Chrome license. I wrote;
How they strike the right balance between using Chrome to deliver more adverts to their users (which means user profiling) and maintaining user privacy will be an interesting thing to watch
and it turns out this balance wasn’t right, but not just in the way I imagined. I thought they would be using Chrome to profile your use of the internet (which they are), however the liecense went much further asserting that anything you create whilst using it is re-usable by Google. Every email you write on GMail or Hotmail, every blog post you write etc. As reported on CNet, Google have since changed the license terms which is a good thing, but your browsing habbit are now profiled in addition to any searches you do, irrespective of search provider.
For more information, see the ongoing CNet coverage of Chrome here.
Its been all over the web for the last 24 hours; Google have announced they’re working on an IE and Firefox competitor called Chrome. I share some of the opinions raised in a Cnet news.com article, especially the points about Google having to share Chrome with the open source community, but I’m not sure I agree with its conclusion.
Matt Asay essentially says people will not defect to Chrome because Google has thus far failed to get any significant adoption of its existing client-side software. He makes a good point, but I can’t help but feel people want a better (or maybe just new) way to surf the web.
Byond tabs (which are “just” an evolution – albeit a very useful one) we’ve not really seen significant innovation in browsers for a number of years. I emphasise seen because both Mozilla and Micorsoft (and to some degree Opera) have all made improvments to their respective browsers, but the basic idea remains the same. Do any of us think the current model cannot be improved? I honestly don’t know. Web Slices (in IE8) seem like a good idea – I’ve long wanted a way to cut out a part of a webpage and paste it onto my desktop and still have it “live” with updated information. However, slices require a webpage to be coded in a certain way to support them, which will slow down adoption.
Google have a strong brand and if Chrome manages to significantly improve the way we use the web without further eroding user privacy, I’m sure it will be adopted. How they strike the right balance between using Chrome to deliver more adverts to their users (which means user profiling) and maintaining user privacy will be an interesting thing to watch.