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So, why are Google pushing Chrome so much?

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K@:
The browser, I mean.

OK, let's not go into the "It's great/it's crap!" thing, here, please.

But, Google are using some pretty insidious ways of trying to get us to install Chrome, now.

I've even installed something which installed the damned thing silently and had to remove it.

It's free, though. So, why are Google pushing it so hard?

Is it because it harvests so much info from/about you, which they can use/sell, or what?

The way it's been going, I wouldn't use it, even if they actually paid me to do so and it was the best browser known to mankind.

Do they plaster ads all over it, or something?

Labradoodle-360:
My guess is that no official Google site has it automatically downloaded to your computer, that's probably a third-party site, and I'd be slightly weary of that, to be honest.

However, Google Chrome is a product of Google. Since Google owns the worlds largest website/search engine, I think it's their decision on whether they want to try to push the product or not, personally, I absolutely love Chrome, it's by far my favourite browser, and I'd recommend it to anyone.

There are no inline advertisements on Chrome, it's clean and fast. It's known for it's speed.

mashby:
Angry Birds promotes it. That's not harmful, right? :)

Arantor:
You mean aside from the bit where they expressly want you to sign into Google's services for everything, and that on a fresh install the first thing you will see is in fact the login page?

There are a lot of reports of third party installers for software also installing Chrome, sometimes asking first, sometimes not - and you can guarantee that Google will be paying for that to occur.

The fact is they are tracking you, and the more data they have about you, the more they can analyse and serve better ads. Thing is, it's not really avoidable - if you actually bother to sit and packet analyse, a lot of the calls home are actually made by other browsers as well to the anti-malware lists that Google maintains.  But the chances of them not logging those requests? Nil.

Chrome used to be known for its speed but other browsers are definitely catching up, and there are also reports now of certain Google services actively trying to shut out other browsers; go try to use Blogger with Opera and you'll get a 'this browser is not supported' message when doing so, but if you change the user agent, it all works absolutely fine.

People wonder why I have a problem with Google Analytics on sites. This is a milder form of the same problem.

K@:
Oh, Avast tried to install it.

I told it to go screw itself. But, for the next ten reboots, or so, it attempted to install it, again!

I did try it, way back. Well, because of the privacy concerns, I actually installed Iron.

Hated it, myself.

And, it seems, Opera is faster.

Anyway, I don't want to get into the "My browser's bigger/better/faster than yours" thing, at all. We all prefer what we prefer.

But why are they pushing it so hard? What's in it, for them? After all, they must pay Avast/whoever to stick their install on their sites.

Is it just the ads?

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