Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

The hiatus is over with a short entry about Google Chrome, the new browser from Google that I learned about on the twitterverse while I was stopped at one rest stop or another.

I can’t test it, because my Mac that has a Windows virtual machine is packed. But I will say this: that doesn’t matter. I won’t be downloading it, or trying it, even when they release Mac or Linux versions.

Why so curmudgeonly you ask? It is open source, after all. And it has some cool features.

Yes, it is open source, and I applaud Google for releasing open source software. However, there was an initial brou-haha about the EULA, which initially suggested that everything you type into the browser belongs to Google (talk about All Your Base Belong to Us!) Yes, they changed it, but it made me realize that it is a Bad Idea to put all of my eggs in one basket. Google already knows enough about me (it reads my mail, my feeds, my search history, and a few shared documents, to boot,) I’m certainly not going to add virtually everything else I do (the percent of things I do using a protocol other than http(s) is dwindling by the second.)

If someone releases a “Chrome minus Google” - that is, a version of Chrome with all of the “phone home” code completely eliminated, then I’ll think about using that version, just to see what it’s like. Otherwise, fuggetaboutit.