Second thoughts on Google's Chrome browser

So, we're 3 days into Chrome and 2 major themes have emerged:

1.  The G-man is watching

There are some serious privacy concerns with Chrome.  In synopsis the original End User Licence Agreement (EULA - pronounced "youla" in the industry) had some pretty strong language with respect to IP (intellectual property) ownership licensing - specifically Google getting a license to everything you enter into Chrome.  For example, Chrome has a feature that provides 'auto-search' as you type in Chrome's browser bar - all these keystrokes are highly valuable to Google, and there was some discussion on CNET that Google would keep ~2% of all this data.  Google has admittted to making a mistake with the EULA and promised to reissue it but this hasn't been done yet to my knowledge.  For many industry folks, including fellow RD Bill Wagner, the privacy concerns are huge and fairly so.  A good history of the EULA issues (and Google's response) is posted at This Post Not Made In Chrome; Google's EULA Sucks Is Fixed.

2.  Chrome is not just a browser

Huh?  If it's not a browser, what is it?  First and foremost, Chrome is a platform for web applications - just read the post from the Google team:

"What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.”

A "modern platform for...applications".  That says it all.  And they've built a pretty mean platform as well - one that has appears to have some substantial performance benefits over IE8 and Firefox. 

So, by release Chrome, Google gets to control of a platform that it's own applications will run much better on - applications like gmail and Google Docs.  With Chrome, they are no longer "dependent" on IE8 and Firefox (of course, these browsers are currently dominant and so Google will still have to play nice with them in the short term).  Take it with a grain of salt, but Google's own benchmark suite puts Javascript performance at 42x faster than IE7 and 10x faster than FireFox 3 as reported by zdnet.  To see this graphically, here's a graph from cnet (higher is better):

Keep in mind this is just for javascript performance not for overall page load times.  So, it's more useful to think of Chrome as a platform for applications than what is commonly thought of as a browser.  Guy Barrette talks more about this here.

There are lot of sites that aren't currently working in Chrome (seems like this is a real beta), but I suspect those will get fixed in short order.