My Digital Life

Mutt Cutts who heads up Google webspam team has posted up some useful info on Chrome:

• Answers to common Google Chrome objections
• Preventing paranoia- when does Google Chrome talk to Google.com

That’s now two posts about something I wasn’t going to look at today! :)

I didn’t really think I’d be posting anything about Chrome… there’s just so much out there already.  Having downloaded and installed it though there are some interesting things in there that I thought I’d comment on.

1. Proxy Settings - it would seem that Chrome uses/obeys the Windows Internet Properties, so if you’re configuring proxy settings etc via GPO Chrome will obey these settings.  From an enterprise perspective this is good - it was the first thing people asked here for example.  It’s nice to see Google following this route, though end users wanting to bypass said proxy servers might not like it..!It’s worth noting that I imported settings etc from IE during the installation, so Chrome might have picked up this behaviour from there.  I’ll have to test it later.
2. Integrated Authentication - Having just visited our SharePoint based intranet I noticed that Chrome isn’t passing through my Windows credentials to the site resulting in a logon prompt that I don’t get with IE.  Once you’ve logged in though, the credentials are cached for the remainder of the session.
3. Sharepoint - From an initial look, Chrome doesn’t seem to offer a great experience in SharePoint, I’m not sure it’s even providing the ‘Level 2 Browser‘ experience you get with Firefox et al.
4. Default Search Engine - This is something I’ve never configured on my computer, though I do always use Google.  It was nice to see that Chrome picked up what must have been the standing default and is defaulting to Live Search.  Not that I use that, but I like that they haven’t just defaulted Google.

Seth Godin made a good point on his blog today about online ads being the new tip jar.

What he’s saying is that if you’re reading some content you like, why not click an ad on the site to say thanks (clicking on the ad will result in the site getting a little bit of cash).

It’s something I’ve tried to do for ages, not usually on the larger commercial sites, but on peoples blogs or on smaller sites where the author is more likely to benefit.  The way I see it, if some content entertains or helps me then I’d like like the author to get something for their troubles, it just seems like a decent thing to do.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/ads-are-the-new.html