When I first heard about Google Chrome, I was very skeptical. Why does this world need another browser to contend with in producing cross browser websites? If open source is what you want, what's wrong with Firefox? So I had to read the Google Chrome comic, and I must admit, it has got me excited. But there is one feature in there that has got me concerned.
Google has suffered a large amount of criticism over the years in relation to privacy. From keeping information on your searches indefinitely, to reading your email, and most recently, getting too close for some with Street View.
One feature that intrigued me in Google Chrome is its location bar searching. It's very cool, it goes above and beyond the recent trend of other browsers to offer past url's based on title searches, it supports full text searching of pages you've visited. But, it also offers suggestions of popular pages that you've never visited. This is cool and convenient, but what does it mean? Everytime you type something into your address bar in Google Chrome, those words get sent to Google. This means that even without using Google's search directly, they can still see what you are typing into your address bar, and most users won't realise it. While that scares me a little, I'm more interested in seeing how the critics will respond to that, are Google up for another onslaught of bad publicity over privacy?