Chrome : Shiny and/or toxic?

Yesterday I installed Google's new toy: The Chrome webbrowser. The looks are very slim as it's using your full screen, nice fonts, no needless borders and I really like the tabs at the top! So it's shiny like chrome...
And Google claims that Chrome is also very fast. Indeed a lot of pages seems to render more quickly than FF or IE did. But I also noticed that on some sites pictures or other more advanced/heavy features are shown half or aren't loaded at all. That way it is easy to claim to have the fastest browser...
But remember how Google earns it's money! It sells adds on their search pages. The better the advertisements fits the fervour of the searcher, the higher the number of hits, the higher the fee. So Google looks for the adds based on your current search...and your previous searches. I think they also record the results you click on (if you look at the source code of a search result page, you can see that the links are not 'just links', but there is also a javascript function executed when you click on them). But until now Google only gathers information when using their search engine.
But what happens when you use a Google browser? When Google can track all your internet traffic by their own browser, they can show you advertisements based on your complete internet history, so matching your fascination even better, and thus earning more money.
Remember, Chrome (or Chromium) is shiny and toxic (wikipedia)!
Or am I just being paranoid?

Comments

How to create neatly formatted Excel documents using PL/SQL?

If there is a requirement to produce output from an application into Excel, you would probably create a CSV (Comma Separated File) with the data and start Excel to show the data - at least that's what I did...until now. The drawback of this solution is that you could only produce data and no nice layout. But Excel is also capable of opening HTML-files and using this you could create Excel files with data and magnificent layout! Let me give an example: 1. Create a procedure to show the data in formatted in an HTML table. CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE display_emp_list IS v_emp_count NUMBER(5); v_empno NUMBER(8); v_ename VARCHAR2(50); v_job emp.job%TYPE; v_sal emp.sal%TYPE; v_bg_color VARCHAR2(10) := ''; CURSOR c_emp IS SELECT empno, initcap(ename), job, sal FROM emp ORDER BY ename; BEGIN SELECT COUNT(*) INTO v_emp_count FROM emp; owa_util.mime_header('application/ms-excel', FALSE); htp.p('Content...

Refresh selected row(s) in an Interactive Grid

In my previous post I blogged about pushing changed rows from the dabatase into an Interactive Grid . The use case I'll cover right here is probably more common - and therefore more useful! Until we had the IG, we showed the data in a report (Interactive or Classic). Changes to the data where made by popping up a form page, making changes, saving and refreshing the report upon closing the dialog. Or by clicking an icon / button / link in your report that makes some changes to the data (like changing a status) and ... refresh the report. That all works fine, but the downsides are: The whole dataset is returned from the server to the client - again and again. And if your pagination size is large, that does lead to more and more network traffic, more interpretation by the browser and more waiting time for the end user. The "current record" might be out of focus after the refresh, especially by larger pagination sizes, as the first rows will be shown. Or (even wors...

APEX ReadOnly Pages - The easy way

If your Oracle APEX Application requires different types of access - full access or readonly - for different types of users, you can specify a Read Only Condition on Page level (or Region, Item, Button, etc.). You can set an Authorization Scheme on Application level, so it'll be applied to all pages. So if you have an Authorization Scheme named 'User Can Access Page' defined by a PL/SQL function like this: return apex_authorization.user_can_access_page ( p_app_id => :APP_ID , p_page_id => :APP_PAGE_ID , p_user => :APP_USER ); then you can code all the logic in the database using the APEX Repository, your own tables or a combination to define whether a user has access to that page or not. But alas it is not possible to define something similar Application wide for a Read Only condition. You can specify an Authorization Scheme 'User has Read Only Access' using a similar signature as the one above and use that on each and e...

Roels Blog

Search This Blog