Filed under: Google, Microsoft, Browsers
If Internet Explorer can’t beat Google Chrome on speed, security, or standards compliance, it appears as though they figured its Achilles Heel might be privacy.
Earlier today, Microsoft’s Peter LePage decided to attack Chrome because of its autocomplete feature — a giant privacy risk, he claims. “As I start to type an address into the address bar, Fiddler [a debugging tool] shows that for nearly every character I type, Chrome sends a request back to Google,” LePage says. “I haven’t even hit enter yet to load the website and Google is already getting information about the domain and sites I’m visiting.”
Nicely done, Peter! Except for the fact that if I have my default search provider set to Bing, it’s sending those requests to Bing instead — not Google.
He then takes the opportunity to point out how IE8 protects your privacy better through the separation of the address bar and search box and IE’s InPrivate browsing mode. Nice recovery! But ah…Chrome has that covered, too, with that whole Icognito thing.
And now it appears as though Microsoft might want to forget the whole thing ever happened — the original post has been taken down, and you’ll just get an error page if you visit the Technet page where it was published.
Chrome has been attacked plenty of times for privacy-related issues (custom error pages, DNS prefetching, the unique ID, etc) but this clearly wasn’t the most well-thought out one.
(note: Silverlight required to play the embedded video clip from Microsoft, of course…)
[via Ars Technica]
Microsoft fires poorly-aimed privacy missile at Google Chrome originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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