Review of Google Chrome

Behind the scenes, we at WellOiledPC do not know what went wrong, for, in our opinion Firefox is really, really good! Yes, Firefox does not completely exit at times, even when you close it down. If you press the Control-Alt-Delete buttons to bring up the Task Manager, you might, sometimes, find Firefox still running as a process and that it continues to consume some amount of memory. (The amount varies, depending on what you had been browsing, before you shut Firefox down). This causes Firefox to run the next time without showing the Book Marks. We at WellOiledPC have worked around this problem by bringing up the Task Manager and killing any running Firefox processes. The next time Firefox is started up, it behaves perfectly, this way!

There are also reports that Firefox does not exit Java scripts - the above behavior is likely to be a result of this. Still-running Java scripts are definitely a huge security risk, for these could be mischievous script! However, in about 2 years of our Firefox usage, we have never faced any security threat due to Java scripts running even after Firefox has been closed. Of course, we have made it that much more difficult for malignant scripts - Java or ActiveX or any other - to run riot, by installing Norton 360 and following our own norms for patching and updating Norton 360 as well as Firefox frequently! With Firefox's base protection and Norton 360's additional protection, we are reasonably safe from malignant stuff!

The other niggling issue with Firefox is that it is quite slow to start up: as slow as Internet Explorer! We have a workaround for this too - we keep Firefox open throughout the day! Since we have an always-on Internet connection and we pay a flat fee every month for Internet access, that doesn't cost us extra money! Yes, we need to be patient the first time we start up Firefox (which we usually do by getting ourselves a cup of coffee or something!)... Not the best of work-arounds, but a work around all the same!

We believe that Chrome is targeted more at Internet Explorer and Microsoft, than Firefox or Apple Safari or Opera. It is a known fact that they differ on a number of approaches, including the issue of Copyrights and Intellectual Property Rights, with each one firmly convinced they are on the right track, while the other isn't!

All said and done, we are unclear about what exactly Google hopes to gain from Chrome. Just consider the following facts:

Again, consider the fact that Google have nothing to show by way of popular software. Their online collaboration tools include marginally-popular office suite clones alone. They are yet to establish themselves as a software development company of any standing. This is quite unlike Microsoft, who have beaten all records when it comes to software development. We believe that it is merely Google's ongoing feud with Microsoft that had caused Google to plunge headlong into online Office Suites earlier and now, into the Browser space. Areas where Microsoft is the resoundingly dominant player. So how much better can Google's Pizzas be, in comparison with the Pizzas of experienced 'Restaurateurs' like Microsoft or Apple? Specially when you consider the fact that they use the same dough (read, Browser engine) that some competitors (Firefox, Flock and SeaMonkey) use!

The fact is, Google's revenues come from their massively-successful online advertisement program AdWords. This is the direct result of Google's hugely popular Search Engine. Everything else, including their pioneering Search Engines, Maps, Picasa, Orkut, YouTube and their popular e-Mail services, are free services that do not net them any money! Neither is their new Browser going to net them moolah - the moment they attempt to charge people for it, a huge shift away from Chrome would happen - assuming it ever gets huge numbers, in the first place! You have not one, but six alternatives currently - namely Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Flock, Safari or SeaMonkey, to shift to! Clearly, however grand and great Chrome might turn out to be, however grand and thrilling Google's statements may be, Chrome will not net them anything in terms of revenue!

Now that we have done with the developments leading up to the release of Chrome, let us look at what Chrome looks like, what it does and what it does not: Remember, we have used it for all of 3 days (like the rest of the world) and so, our review would not be as complete as those we have done for the other, older Browsers. Stay tuned - we will voice our experiences with Google Chrome right here!

Chrome1

To install Chrome, click on the link given at the top of this page: it will download a tiny file of less than 500 KB size, which then automatically installs the entire set of Chrome files. Installation is simple and can be performed unattended, but no time for coffee breaks - its fast!

Chrome is built with the tried and trusted Mozilla 5.0 Browser Engine. However engines alone do not make up a car, high-quality dough alone does not create mouth-watering Pizzas! What we have in Chrome is a Browser that starts up in a flash - unlike Firefox, Chrome does not let us get ourselves the customary cup of coffee!

Once Chrome starts up, you realize that it has an extremely simple-looking interface - much like GMail! So what constitutes the nearly 70 MB of disk space that the Chrome folder occupies? We don't know - yet! What Chrome presents you is maximum screen space - a little more than what Safari does, since Chrome does not even have a Menu Bar at the top of the screen, or a permanent Status Bar at the bottom of the screen!

Interestingly, despite the simple interface, we found most of our favorite features from our eight Browsers right in Chrome - be it Multiple Tabs, Passwords storage, URL Auto Complete from your Bookmarks, recently-visited pages and popular search engine listings (like Firefox), Mini Browser or Speed Dialing (like Opera), caching visited web pages for fast retrievals, Pop-up Blocking, Phishing Filter, whatever...

A new and useful feature in Chrome is the ability to save a web page as a shortcut on the Desktop, as a shortcut in your Start Menu or as a shortcut in your Quick Launch Bar. Open any web page and click on the New Page icon in the frugal Menu Bar. One of the options is Create application shortcuts, which lets you create one or all the above shortcuts. The shortcut opens in Google Chrome - even if your Default Browser is something else, say Internet Explorer or Firefox! However this reduces the difference between URLs and applications and could be useful.

But then again, some of the features we take for granted are sorely missed - like the ability to send a web page as an e-Mail link, a full-screen mode, a quick method to magnify the page (rather than the text alone) and perhaps the most serious missing feature, no way to organize one's Bookmarks! Google claims that all these will be included in the final version - lets see...

The screenshot at the top shows the "Speed Dial" feature of Chrome. Unlike Opera (which lets you set each of its Speed Dials), the slots in Chrome are filled in automatically by the sites you visit most frequently. Frankly, we like Opera's implementation a whole lot better: Chrome's implementation is mindless, Opera's is customized to your needs!

Click for larger image

Web pages take about the same time to load in Chrome, as in the other Browsers: it is only Chrome's start up speed that takes one's breath away! All through our testing so far, Chrome has never faltered, crashed or left anything in the memory when closed down. It also displays all the sites we visited using it correctly. It does not have problems running Javascript or displaying website layouts the way its creators intended to display them.

All this is wonderful indeed, but here are its drawbacks: at the moment, Norton 360 or other Browser-integrated AntiSpyware and Anti Phishing software do not integrate with Chrome. We like the additional layer of security that such software gives us and miss it sorely!

Again, as on date, the number of Plug-ins for Chrome is Zero - we are used to a number of specialized Plug-ins for Firefox. It is these Plug-ins that make our daily tasks easy and fun, but these are completely absent under Chrome, the Mozilla engine notwithstanding!

While we think that the temporary Status Bar is a nice development (it comes on only while the site is loading - as soon as the site is 100% loaded, it disappears, letting you see that much more of the site in the same screen!), we aren't sure about the lack of a Menu Bar! Like the rest of Chrome, Customizations are severely limited too and follows the footsteps of GMail, which has zero customization options!

Chrome also has an 'Incognito Mode", in which cookies, browsing history, etc., are not saved onto your Computer. We had earlier been using Disk Cleaner for doing all this and more and currently use Piriform's CCleaner. CCleaner is in version 2.11.636, while Disk Cleaner is in version 1.57. Either of these does a wonderful job cleaning your cookies, browsing history, Windows Temporary files, files in the Recycle Bin, etc. In addition, CCleaner has a nifty feature that lets you clean up your Registry as well. Don't be fooled by the fact that Disk Cleaner is freeware and CCleaner donationware - both are excellent solutions in their niche! Therefore Chrome's 'Incognito Mode' holds no charm to us, as it does a few of these tasks alone!

The Bottom Line is, Chrome is a new Browser that is fast to load, offers almost every feature in rival Browsers, but completely fails to excite you!

Speaking of exciting one - we have written a tiny piece of Java code to identify your Browser, Version and Screen Resolution. The script is on our Home Page - do check it out. Whatever be your Screen Resolution, it correctly identifies it. Now to the interesting part: our script correctly identifies Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Apple Safari and even the least-known Browser, SeaMonkey. It wrongly identifies Mozilla Flock as Mozilla Firefox - a mistake we may gloss over, since both Flock and Firefox (and SeaMonkey) use the same Mozilla Browser engine. What surprises (and therefore excites) us is the fact that Google Chrome is identified as Safari by our Java code! We are digging in deeper to understand this quirk - stay tuned, if you would like to read our findings!

According to Google, each of the open Tabs runs in its own container (they call it "Sandbox"). Therefore if one open sites misbehaves, the others do not crash. Since we have not had the fortune/ misfortune of sites misbehaving - either under Chrome or the others, we do not know just how useful this feature is...

Google is known to label its software Beta: GMail is still in Beta, though it is now about four years old. We therefore wonder whether Chrome will ever get out of the Beta status! If it does, we would like to see the following features in the final edition of Chrome:

The above list may grow, as we get more familiar with Chrome - stay tuned, bookmark this page! Meanwhile, here is a round-up of some of the best reactions from all over, on Chrome:

Google's Chrome Web browser may be a highlight for open-source application development. Yet Google has moved to quell concerns that the EULA afforded Google a little too much control with regard to what happens to the information people entered into the browser window. Google's Omnibox also raises privacy concerns, but these don't seem to have much merit. Are you comfortable using Google Chrome?

For all of the glitz and glamour swirling around its Chrome Web browser, Google is working out to put out fires among corporate users concerned that the EULA enables Google to own source code and other proprietary information. One day after Google's beta launch of the Web browser Sept. 2, users complained that Section 11 of the end-user license agreement gave Google too much control over information after it was entered into the browser.

An anonymous Google Watch reader told me Sept. 2 that his company is banned from using Chrome. He also noted that a security officer of another organization told him Chrome was put on that company's banned software list, calling for users to remove it from their system. The reason? He explained:

Google has included some extremely harsh terminology in their user license that gives them ownership of content you view through the viewer. In our environment that could include source code, proprietary information stored in PDFs viewed online and other property. Until we can research the impact, this browser will remain on the do not install list.

Google swiftly amended the section, but here is the original iteration of the section that troubled people:

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.

A Google spokesperson told me Google has since updated the language in Section 11, which was culled from Google's broad Universal Terms of Service, used for many of Google's products.

Section 11.1 now reads: "You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."

This seemed to mollify my anonymous poster, who later added this comment: "So maybe they aren't that evil after all."

Snarky comments aside, Google has other issues it must contend with, including questions of privacy. Google stores 2% of the information users type into the Omnibox, a bar that combines a browser's address bar and search box. It should be noted that this applies only to Google Chrome users who have Google set as their default search engine on the browser and have the suggest feature turned on.

A Google spokesperson explained to me that "Many of those entries are for search queries, which we already store basic log information for as we do for a search made from any browser when the user hits enter." Also, a user can either turn off the suggest feature or use the Incognito mode and entries into the Omnibox will not be stored in Google's logs, unless the user hits enter and has entered a search query in the Omnibox.

In my opinion, 2% isn't so bad. Google is already tucking away info on our search queries, so why should the Omnibox be any different? And if you're totally paranoid about this, turn off auto-suggest; you need to make the decision about what's more important. Is it the auto-suggest feature, or the comfort of knowing that Google can't access the minute quantity of search query data from you through Chrome that it already gets from your general search queries?

Google's finally gone and done it - they've built and released a browser, the most fundamental window to the computing experience of a new era. That's big news, but the small print is raising some concerns. What appears to be a recycled Terms of Service (from Google Docs) gives Google a long list of rights to reuse and share with other companies "any Content which you submit, post or display on or through the Services." Update: Since this controversy has erupted, Google has removed the offending section of the Terms of Service. It seems that the default Google service TOS includes these kinds of claims, even though they may not be as appropriate in some circumstances as in others.

Google's Matt Cutts dropped by our previous coverage to say that "No, we don't want rights to everything you send through Chrome." Can Google be trusted though? Below we review just the most recent history of privacy concerns raised about Google. It's a mixed bag, but we argue that given this context, no individual case should be taken lightly.

Last November we wrote about how Google could fight Facebook by taking the high road regarding user privacy. A year later it might seem like user control over information is a more reasonable request, but neither concept seems to be getting a lot of respect. There are big important questions about privacy online that need to be addressed. We discussed what some of those general questions were in January. Looking at them in regards to the particular steps taken by the Google giant is important as well.

Since everyone seems to be determined to cover Google’s newly-launched Chrome browser on every side, I have decided to join in after I’ve been playing with the browser for a few days and reading literally hundreds of posts about it everywhere. This post is intended to demystify Google’s browser a little and show that some of the hype around it is merely about Google actually launching a browser instead of the innovative approaches implemented in the browser itself - no matter how hard Google may try to persuade everyone the browser is full of entirely new ideas not seen anywhere else.

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This seems to be the most hyped feature of Google Chrome - the one everyone seems to be very excited about after having Firefox crashes caused by a process running in one of the tabs. Unfortunately, there is some disappointment here as this approach is far from new and it is even used in Internet Explorer 8 beta - the browser everyone thinks Chrome is intended to compete with. Microsoft named this “tab isolation” and the feature description reads: “If a website or add-on causes a tab to crash in Internet Explorer 8, only that tab is affected. The browser itself remains stable and other tabs remain unaffected, thereby minimizing any disruption to your browsing experience.” Does not it sound familiar after all those reviews of Chrome everyone must have read already?

We’ve heard authoritative opinions that Chrome is not sending any information from a user’s computer to Google’s servers but this myth was also debunked pretty soon. The thing is that Chrome’s address and search bar “Omnibox” with auto-suggestion enabled actually sends all the characters typed by a user to Google servers (even before the user hits enter) if Google is set as a default search engine. And even after Google provides suggestions based on those keystrokes, Google will keep about 2% of this information along with the IP addresses that send those characters to Google. This is certainly supposed to raise concerns in those users already worried about the volume of information Google already has for almost every internet user.

Domain Highlighting in IE8 Beta IE8Beta

Google Chrome is very proud of constantly downloading information on websites that are known to be insecure for a web user to visit and warning the users of potential malware and phishing threats. This sounds innovative and useful enough but actually Internet Explorer seems to already offer something very similar as a SmartScreen Filter for the very same purpose of protecting a user from malware and phishing attacks.

While many of liked how Chrome highlights domain names to help us easier understand exactly what site we are browsing. But I guess those surprised are simply those web users that have not seen Internet Explorer 8 yet as Microsoft’s Beta browser offers exactly the same highlighting functionality!

Domain Highlighting in Chrome

Find under Chrome Chrome09

Same here - an exact copy of Internet Explorer functionality. The idea is that when you click Ctrl+F to find some text on the page you are currently browsing, the browser will start searching immediately instead of waiting for you to type in the entire search term and hit ‘Enter’. Besides, all the matches will be highlighted immediately instead of making you go from the current to the next one. And this is not pioneered by Chrome either - Internet Explorer 8 has exactly the same functionality. The only difference between the two browsers is that Chrome highlights the first match in orange and the rest of them in yellow while IE highlights the first one in blue with the rest of them in… yellow as well.

Find under IE 8 IE8Beta2

It must look like a cool functionality that you can resize the input box when you type a comment somewhere on Reddit or FriendFeed. But Google is not the first to the game with this enhancement either: Safari has been doing it for a while now and I believe it has something to do with Chrome and Safari using the same WebKit rendering engine.

Sure, when Google launches something we expect immediately that it will be the most advanced something meeting all the industry standards. Unfortunately there’s an unpleasant surprise for us here: Chrome does not show perfect results in ACID2 and ACID3 standards compatibility tests. And while it performs better than stable versions of other popular browsers, it is still outperformed by development releases of Firefox, Opera, and Safari. So no matter how advanced this one may be, we should not expect it to be 100% compliant and actually the best browser of those currently in development.

So after demystifying some of the latest and greatest approaches to browsing in Chrome I can say that it is absolutely not visible that Google is so much of an innovator in this particular case: they simply took the best features and ideas from existing browsers (or just listened to what users wanted browsers to do) and wrapped them into a very pompous launch of Chrome.

Besides, it must mean that we as web users simply tend to love everything about Google much more than anything about Microsoft so we have barely noticed very similar features in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 beta but now that Google introduces them we have overhyped them as much as we could. Now tell me why our affection towards the company behind a product is more important than the product itself?

The Creeping Crawl of the Social Graph API
In February of this year, we raised concerns about the new Google Social Graph API, which was going beyond indexing the formally declared social connections that the company focused on and in fact pulled in social graph data from MySpace and who knows where else. That controversy has died down, but our concerns still linger about this admittedly very useful sounding program.

Health Records and Privacy
In May Google launched Google Health, and privacy advocates shuddered in fear. In the end, we found Google Health's privacy protections to be very strong. Perhaps it was because they were so strong that the whole application felt overly cautious, tame and unexciting. It's a difficult balance to strike.

Handing Over Usernames
In July Google gave up YouTube user names to Viacom in a copyright lawsuit. Privacy watchdogs complained that Google should have resisted the pressure.

Streetview
Streetview, the van-shot images of city streets around the world, has also faced criticism from privacy advocates. It faced a legal challenge in the UK in July. Last month Google faced allegations of streetview photographers driving past no-trespassing signs onto private roads - though the company claims such incidents were a mistake and have removed the found photos of private land.

We'll Tell You Who Your Friends Are
One issue that made a small number of people very angry was the loose handling of Google Reader shared items. People you've emailed with repeatedly or who were otherwise understood as a contact using some Google algorithm were suddenly shown all the items you marked to "share" in Google Reader. Previously, shared items were something you exposed selectively by sharing an obscure URL for your shared items feed. Google's initial response was to tell people to stop sharing if they didn't like it, but last month the company finally implemented a more nuanced solution. Points for Google, after a fight.

Code of Compliance
Also in August, Google joined with Yahoo and Microsoft in working on a "Code of Conduct" that offered some lukewarm commitment to protecting free speech during the Olympics over the companies' networks. The wording of the proposed agreement was very vague.

It Goes On and On...
This is just a short look at a few of the privacy issues people have raised about Google's practices. Beyond the particular practices, though, there are inherent risks brought about by the huge amount of information Google controls. As we wrote in our post "Questions to Consider in the Coming Privacy Wars"
Hello, Google. Hello Google Search, Maps, Sky, Streetview, GMail, Docs, 23andMe genetics, Talk, Goog411, Google Scholar... surely I'm still missing a lot of the data that Google has collected about us.

Is data centralization in the hands of a single vendor an inherent threat to privacy? Yes. To draw an analogy, trusting the "Do No Evil" line is like saying you'd support a President that you like changing the constitution to allow warrantless wiretapping. Centralization of power, even if it's exercised benevolently at any given time, is not in our best interest in the long term. In fact, I'd argue that it's highly irrational.

That's the context we see all this happening in. So if Google and Matt Cutts want to say "trust us, what we want is not what it looks like in a literal reading of that agreement you just singed on to" - well then we ask you, readers, to judge for yourself. It makes us feel very funny.

We love Google apps, but with great power...comes a responsibility to do something really extraordinary to protect our privacy while still delivering such great services. We're still waiting for that.

So there you are - not just our views at WellOiledPC, but published views about Google and Chrome, from experts the world over!

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