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Google wants to shift users to a new platform - its own - for which there is much hype but no great enthusiasm. Like similar migrations the new platform offers very few advantages - and plenty of disadvantages. Not only are great chunks of functionality missing, but even when you're supposed to be "online and always connected", you might not be.

Chrome is simply a technology demonstration - and I can't see Firefox users with their carefully-cultivated selection of add-ons, or Opera users, making the jump any time soon. But Chrome is a Trojan Horse for bundling Google's Gears onto your PC - and in the hope that manufacturers look to Google services for new Eee-type lightweight PCs, perhaps running something like gOS, the Ubuntu-derivative.

Gears is simply designed to make Google's online services more attractive, and makes it looks like Google's is setting the standard: leading where everyone else follows. (That isn't entirely unfair.) And as a technology demonstration, Chrome succeeds.

So will Google succeed? Well, you tell me... But your 80s throwback will offer a couple of perspectives, that I've looked for this week, but failed to find.

One of these is that "the company that knows secrets about the future™" is a myth created by the press - particularly the glossy end of the US business press. It's a powerful narrative, and suits their lazy writers, but the reality turns out to be very different.

Years later, we discover the company was simply blundering on in a state of chaos, slapping tactics together until they passed for a strategy, and winging it. And so a consequence of this myth-making is that it makes the poster child - the Google or the Microsoft - look much cleverer and more coherent than it really is. It's an elaborate game of bluff.

At the time Windows offered business a cheap and cheerful "standard", but Microsoft's success was not based on technical excellence - on any unique knowledge of 32-bit computing or excellence in UI design - but rather more to its iron grip on the PC distribution channel. PC manufacturers paid Microsoft whether they shipped MS-DOS and Windows with the PC or not. So why ship anything else? Antipathy to IBM helped Microsoft enormously, too, of course.

But I simply don't see where Google has the same grip over routes to market that Microsoft could exploit.

While much of the press has creamed itself over Chrome this week, it's almost rude to point this next one out. When there's one computer serving the planet - even if it's Google's - that's a single point of failure.

And in that sense, Google's vision of computing looks less like a piece of risk insurance, than a very big risk indeed.

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said by SUMware :

Chrome is a security nightmare, indexes your bank accounts September 04, 2008
After playing around with Google’s brand new Chrome browser, we’ve discovered that its history search box will fetch all types of data - even text from HTTPS-protected financial sites like Washington Mutual and Capital One. With a few utterly simple keywords like balance, account and Sept., everything from balance information, account numbers and even how much you spent at Costco can be pulled up.

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So is this all a big deal? Well anyone who wants to search your financial information would need local access to your machine and if a person is sitting at your computer, you have a lot more things to worry about than him/her using Chrome’s history search.

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said by SUMware :

Chrome: Google's biggest threat to your privacy September 4, 2008
The danger comes from one of Chrome's niftiest features, what it calls the Omnibox. The Omnibox is, in fact, the browser's Address Bar, but it has a feature that looks at what you type, and then auto-suggests sites that it thinks you're about to enter. As you type, the suggestions appear.

As you type, your text is sent back to Google, which analyzes it and makes the auto-suggestions. That's why you don't even need to press Enter for the text to head to Google.