With much anticipation, Google released its own web browser back in the last quarter of 2008, called Chrome. Many of us in the development community wondered at the impact, everything from how good it would be knowing the effort that Google typically puts into their products, to the concern of yet another browser to have to develop and test sites for. So far the impact has been minimal. Chrome is a good product that adheres quite well to web standards and has not caused too much concern for web developers having to make many special accomodations for it. Current estimates put its usage somewhere around 5% give or take of web users actually using Chrome, putting it ahead of Safari and Opera in just the few months of its existence.  

One bigger concern that the web community should have beyond simply how good Chrome is, should be the privacy issues that it brings with it. Not all early adopters realize some of the things that Google has built into Chrome to track what you're doing online. And the even bigger concern, what will Google do once they continue to gain market share.  All of these privacy concerns can be attributed to helping to improve the user experience and providing better search results, but the information can definitely be used for more than that.

A good alternative to Chrome, is Iron, another free browser that is built off of the same underlying rendering engine that Chrome uses without any of the privacy concerns. In some initial tests, the speed and overall performance seem to be just as good as Chrome. The interface is simple and does not get in the way and browsing a multitude of sites has yielded excellent rendering results with no major issues with any sites I have visisted. So if security is a concern, you might want to take a look at Iron as a good alternative to Chrome. Here are some of the privacy concerns to be aware of with Chrome courtesy of the Iron website:

  • Chrome creates a unique ID through which a user can be theoretically identified.
  • Chrome remembers up to the second exactly when the software was installed. 
  • Depending on the configuration, each time you put something in the address line,this information is sent to Google to provide suggestions. 
  • Depending on the configuration, if you have typed a false address in the adress bar, this is sent to Google and you get an error message from Google's servers. 
  • Depending on the configuration, details about crashes or failures are sent Google's servers. 
  • Chrome transmits information in encoded form to Google, for example, when and where Chrome has been downloaded.
  • Chrome installs an updater, which loads at every Windows startup, in the background.
  • It calls, depending on the configuration, five seconds after launch the Google homepage and opens it in the background.