On Mon, 17 Oct 2011 23:21:55 +0100 James Freer jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com allegedly wrote:
[running Xubuntu]
Just wondering if anyone uses it and what their thoughts are!
That depends upon your attitude to privacy.
I decided to have a change from Firefox. I liked Chrome and didn't find any problems - except for the bookmarks. In FF i installed the google toolbar and had all my bookmarks stored in my gmail account. Useful while i was teaching and using lots of different machines...(no longer) but i've got into the habit so i wanted to do that with Chrome. Setting up Sync and logging in to gmail i don't find it syncing at all. Having installed Chrome i then found that FF google toolbar bookmarks didn't work. Assuming there was conflict between the browsers i removed FF and google toolbar - problem remains.
I think i've found a glitch somehow and will only know when i install the new Xubuntu release.
I have a real problem with google. Their business model (funded by advertising) is inconsistent with my concept of personal privacy rights. If you find it OK to let google know everything about your browsing habits (and the fact that you have stored your bookmarks in a google service suggests that you do find it OK), then I'd say go ahead and use chrome.
Personally I wouldn't use chrome (which calls home to a variety of google networks in an interesting fashion) do that. Nor would I ever use the google toolbar which also reports back to google in a way that many may find disturbing. For example, I recall a while back some security researchers reporting that they had found that google had indexed pages which were supposedly "orphaned" (i.e they did not have links from anywhere on the web) and so should have been invisible. It turned out that google toolbar reported visited pages so the advertising giant "discovered" them.
Now "security through obscurity" is not necessarily a good idea, but I'd bet that many people have created "private" web pages which have no external inward links in the belief that no search engine could then would find them. If they have google toolbar installed (or anyone they send the link to has that installed, then this is not true.
The fact that chrome doesn't support the nascent "do not follow" standard and that google is fighting hard against any legislative attempt to enforce the standard is also indicative of their stance.
Mick
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