It’s no surprise to me that there is an immediate response to the Google announcement of their web browser. The responses seem to fall into three categories:
- “wow – this is cool”
- “hmmmm… more of Google take but not give”
- “Google are spying on us again”
The first is fine I guess. I find the second annoying as I believe they display a significant prejudice and lack of understanding of the ways in which Google gives back to the open source world – but these commentators are entitled to their opinion. It’s the final one I want to look at here.
The concerns about Google using Chrome to spy on us are ridiculous. Of course the address bar defaults to Google as the search engine Chrome is Google’s distribution of Chromium, the open source version of the browser. They don’t invest these resources for nothing, you know. There may be bits of code in Chrome that some find invasive but such code may exist in any product, including Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera and any other browser.
I have a plea for all those spending time speculating about what Google may or may not be trying to do with our data usin the Chrome browser. Either don’t use it or donate your currently wasted speculation time to something useful.
If you are a programmer review some code that concerns you (better still provide a patch that removes your concern). If you are a user get on the discussion lists and ask for an explanation of what data is sent back and forth or ask where are the switches for changing the default search engine (check the archives first – someone may have asked already). Or you can go into the Issue Tracker and ask for a new feature for example, ask for your favourite search engine to be an option, or maybe we want a feature to turn off all non-essental communication with Google servers. Chrome is a browser that is built from the open source Chromium project.
The test is not whether Chrome does things you don’t like, it is whether Chromium matures into a configurable browser tool that will do the things you do like. It can’t do that unless you get involved in any way you can – stop wasting time complaining about what might be our future and start influencing it.
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