Chrome's EULA

William — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Yah, I'm probably like the 10 trillionth person to post about it, but until now I hadn't really had a chance to look at it. This morning Gizmodo had a piece on it which definitely makes you shake your head thinking WTF. However like most things, I'm guessing that there's a huge gulf between 'reserving the right' to something and actually using that right. Additionally, I'm guessing a lot of this is just legal CYA. For instance, they could want access to information you post on a blog for efficiency purposes (being privy to it directly instead of having to crawl for it later) and just use language like this to avoid battles over the content. Then again, i'm just speculating as I'm not a lawyer and have no clue.

I decided to search around and see how much was written about this and as of the time of this post, the terms "Chrome EULA Controversy" returned over 7,430 hits if taken together and well over 15k if you leave out the quotes. And if you've been following this then you no doubt are aware that Google capitulated and is taking all the yucky stuff out. If you're trying to roll out a new product and have a big impact, then you definitely wouldn't want the type of press Google was getting over this.

Their quick capitulation is some food for thought though. the most likely answer is that they didn't really think they were doing anything bad b/c they weren't intending to use it, it's boilerplate etc etc. So it's no sweat off of their backs to just get rid of it. If you wanted to be conspiracy minded about it (I can only imagine for instance the Cow Alex Jones is going to have over it), it wouldn't be hard to imagine that they threw it out there, willing to take it back but more than willing to use and abuse it if public outcry wasn't too bad. I'm guessing there's a small shred to that theory but little more.

All in all though, I think Chrome's introduction is a good thing. Firefox kicked off a ferocious battle that led to IE becoming a much better browser. With another major player entering the market (and one that certainly has gotten under MS' skin when it comes to search), I'm guessing MS will pull some rabbits out of hats with IE 8 and when the dust settles, we'll see some awesome functionality. In the meantime, I like Chrome ok, but still sticking with IE for the foreseeable future.

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Chrome's EULA