Tag Archives: Internet Explorer

[Windows] Google Chrome – The New Operating System?

[Update] Sept 26th, 2008: Added the SRWare Iron browser under Downloads

The Next Browser War

The next Browser War has begun yesterday night, when Google released their new view on the Web. A new Browser called “Chrome“. Chrome is the most powerful weapon, when it comes to the question: how to connect services locally stored on your PC with services available on the net.

Microsoft – the market leader in the field of operating systems – cannot be amused about that. Chrome has the potential to make a large amount of local stored services (like Office solutions) dispensable, means: what will we need Windows for?

The Thing with the Privacy

But it is that simple only from the view of the economists. Highlighting the potentials is their sphere of action. With a sociological view people will ask, why they should give eben more private data in the hands of Google. Google’s only ambition is making money through advertisements, thus giving away for free all the services people will need in order to provide the users with customer specific advertisements.

Even now Google has already collected more private data than Microsoft ever had the possibility to. And every Chrome installation got a unique serial number integrated. That serial will be used for tracking and aggregation of customer behaviour data. We will see how people will agree with Google’s strategy.

The Future

What likely is: the end of Mozilla could be coming silently. In the past Mozilla actually was bankrolled by Google: 85% of their revenue comes from Google (read here and here). Although Google and Mozilla prolonged their sponsoring contracts until 2011, there is basically no need for Google to sponsor Mozilla anymore, when supplying an own browser like Chrome.

Google’s battle against Microsoft has reached a new level of escalation. We’re quite certain to see Microsoft’s answer very soon.

Downloads

» Download Mozilla Firefox here
» Download Google Chrome beta here
» Download Internet Explorer 8 beta here
» Download Opera here
» Download Apple Safari here
» Download SRWare Iron here (german page!)…

Performance Tests

Golem.de did a performance test for all these browsers. Find it here:

[MacOS] Paypal about to block Safari Users

english

According to a white paper by Paypal, Safari lacks certain specific anti-phishing protections and EV SSL (Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer) certificates. Paypal will in the first place just tell the users, that they are using those unsafe browsers. Later on Paypal will take steps to refuse access to Paypal at all, when users are still using those browsers. The main problem is, Safari is not safe from fishing attacks. According to MacNN Safari is the only browser to lag behind in comparison to other browsers like Firefox 2, Opera or Internet Explorer 7.

By the way: this article is written on the Mac version of Firefox