Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Google Chrome Continued

Last week Google released the Beta of its Browser, Chrome. Within the last few days some interesting information about the browser has been released.

Google Chrome in its first week took 1.48 percent of Browser Market Share. This number later stabilized at 1 percent and finished the week off at holding 0.7 percent of the Browser Market. What the bigger surprise is, they took the share solely from Internet Explorer. Overall Internet Explorer had a bad week, as it lost market share (Down to 71 percent) to all browsers including Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Chrome also received its first patch on Sunday, which addressed many security issues.

Chrome did receive some serious complaints during it first week, as it became known that the Google URL bar, the “OmniBox” records user keystrokes and transmits them to Google’s servers. Google has changed its policy and will make all data received Anonymous, but security experts have questioned exactly how that will occur. In most cases, the keystrokes sent to Google are not saved, but the 2 percent that do have the users IP address recorded. The OmniBox feature can be disabled by changing the search engines that Google can use in the URL bar.

This browser is important to E-Learners as it’s another browser we have to be concerned about when designing online training. The privacy matters related to the browser are also concerning, as we have to be worried what information it is sending to Google about where our online training is and what could be in it.

Article: Chrome snatches share from IE
Article: Google bends to Chrome privacy criticism

1 comment:

Tony D said...

I started testing Chrome last week and found overall it has some promising features. However simple things like viewing some videos and uploading pictures to snapfish prove to be near impossible. Snapfish offers a program to upload multiple files. When you try to download the proram Chrome just sits there and never downloads.

What does this mean for Instructional Designers? Well Eric is correct that we need to be mindful of this browser for reasons mentioned above. If the eLearner can not download or connect to a course there is a potential for loosing them because they will see it as the designer's fault.