Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Do we really need a new browser?

As some of you may have heard, Google, in their ongoing campaign for online domination (hey, I have a Gmail account, I use Google Reader, and Blogger, which I use to host my blog, is owned by...guess who?), released their own web browser, called Chrome. Thus, we now have 5 significant players in the desktop web browser space...Microsoft (Internet Explorer), Opera (Opera Browser), Apple (Safari), Mozilla (Firefox), and Google.

Now, I understand that Google looks to Chrome to provide greater flexibility and integration to match the growing richness of the content available on the web. But Google is already a significant supporter of Firefox...why not just work with Mozilla to bring that functionality to Firefox? So is this really innovation for the sake of advancing the evolution of the web, or is it innovation for the sake of innovation?

Or innovation for the sake of control? Seems there's some interesting language in Chrome's license agreement that basically gives Google rights to any content you create using Chrome. So, for instance, if I wrote this blog post using Chrome, they could use it however they wanted. (By the way, here is what the Blogger terms of service say about my intellectual property rights: "Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services.")

I think I'll pass for the moment.

(Note: Google has since announced that they'll be removing that language from its license agreement. Why was it there in the first place?)

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