I read this post in The Age Newspaper: Google backs down over browser amid privacy concerns. I promptly uninstalled my Chrome browser, and went back to my faithful Firefox.

With all the craze around Google Chrome, I decided to install and try it out. I loaded my Commonwealth Bank Internet Banking site, and before I put in my user details I flicked open another tab and there it was: right on the front page about Google’s terms and conditions of using Chrome. Holy cow!

So it seems one of the world’s biggest IT companies just uses standard user agreements, and then realises that not all of it will fit appropriately for all applications. Basically, the old agreement stated that Google will have exclusive royalty free rights to anything and everything a user entered into the browser, including banking details, search terms etc. That was promptly changed when users started to backlash. I guess somehow at Google is already fired over this embarrassment.

Interestingly, I found the Official Google Video about Chrome where this guy says (at 2.28): “In building Chrome, we were very concerned about security“. Whoa!!! LOL.

For more information on Google Chrome, visit their home page, or read about it on Techcrunch, CNET, GigaOm and other tech blogs. However, I feel these sites offer quite a biased opinion. There’s hundreds of other blogs/sites out there with their own two cents worth.

Anyhow, I will stick to Firefox until Google fine tunes its browser.

Update (13.09.08): One of the most annoying non-features of Chrome is that it does not show the bar of how much a page has loaded. This is so fricken annoying! You never know when your page is about to show up, or whether even it is! Which idiot didn’t add this feature, one of the most basic ones of all.