Google smears Chrome on 'sacred' home page When an army of angry American watchdogs barked for a one-word privacy link on the Google home page, the search giant refused. At least initially. And when it finally acquiesced a month later, it did so only after carefully removing another word from the page. The way head Googirl Marissa Mayer tells it, the Google home page …
ThankYouThankYouThankYou, Metz!!! Outstanding bit of public protection ... saving us all from Google's evilness. Had I not read this excellent article, I might have gone a whole day without reading anything about Google. Thank you for keeping your eagle eye on that dastardly company. Simply outstanding detective work, and I couldn't have found a more important issue to write about. Blessing on you.
>You CAN Polish Turd
>It just needs to be frozen...
Spot the engineer! Indeed, after freezing, you can polish one.
But <Dilbert>
* Sealing it inside a shell of some sort (e.g. lamination), although it's a bit of a cheat because you'll actually be polishing the shell.
* Allow it to fossilise - they can be polished
* Baking to remove the water could give a polish-able surface
* Application of a caking agent could harden the surface
</Dilbert>
I'm sure there are more, although all of them are partly dependent on Curry/Chilli/Guiness intake as well...
Rather than echoing some of the sentiments up above, pointing out that their a company with a product, and that this isn't worth of a news article (oh look, I did echo them!), I thought I'd say something new...
Haven't google always done this? Big product launch, little link under the search box. For things like the Google Talk launch, etc etc?
Did nobody actually READ the article where they were talking about having only 28 words?
"(That's the word count for the basic page if you are signed out, there's no promotional line running beneath the search box, you've set Google as your homepage and thus don't get the "Make Google Your Homepage!" link, and you count "©2008 Google" as two words.)"
Seeing as they're promoting Chrome, I'd think that this qualifies as a "Promotional line"
"when I'm already using the Chrome browser to view their site? Even the basic coding on my own humble web site is able to determine what browser version is viewing it."
I expect Chrome is just pretending to be Internet Explorer. If you listen to Firefox and Opera weenies, all browsers pretty much *have* to pretend to be IE because all web servers refuse to serve pages to any other, and the UK.gov does a survey to decide which browsers they have to support and, ooo lookie here, everyone is using IE.
The "user-agent" feature has to be the single biggest design flaw in HTTP. Initially, it facilitates non-standard features. Eventually, it forces everyone to lie to the server. Neither is a terribly great design feature for a network protocol.
...which is the only reason I forgave her rather self-important and facile 28 words article. And to be fair, we can also discount this Reg article, as one of her caveats for the 28 is:
"there's no promotional line running beneath the search box"
There is, so there can be more than 28. Write a proper article, please.
Wow, I'm irritable today.
Have to admit to using Chrome as well. It loads faster than firefox and with less ...errrmm .. chrome. The main reason I changed from Opera to Firefox in the first place.
The security of the product I couldn't care less about as I am at work and that is an SEP. AdBlock would be nice, but the limited web sites I will visit are not that ad heavy.
It doesn't seem to parse our Intranet very well, but then thats a pile of smeggy M$ Sharepoint.
@Ken
It identifies itself more closely to Safari (obvious really) than IE, but still you can identify it properly so that's no excuse:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.29 Safari/525.13
@David
I was wondering the same thing. I'd guess it's a fairly harmless but nasty tasting 'Rainman' type gag about how autistics are all really really really rule bound or something. Considering El Reg's target audience, I'd have thought it was a pretty dumb slur to make, no?
So what if they advertise their product. isn't that what firefox does on it's site, opera on it's and IE on M$. really what does it matter. a new browser is coming. hopefully better than the rest. so far it's a pretty good browser. oh and get this, it's still in it's first beta stage. FF is in past it's release and still has rendering issue. EI, well geez. I am not even going to get started on that one. As far as 28 words go. Who cares how many words their are. what laws say they can't change that. It's web page for information. that is what they offered. INFO ON THE NEW PRODUCT. oh and it's free!!!! Stop whining about something so trivial
How about this? Migrate a database where:
1) Users are authenticated against a plain-text "users" table. To "protect" this, the table has no access rights assigned to it. To allow authentication to this "no rights" table, the front end has hard-coded into it a SQL login with SA rights.
2) Rather than link tables or use stored procedures, the Access front end uses queries on the fly of the type: "Select * from {database.table ]user=[aboveaccountwithSArights] pw=[twowordpasswordassignedtoabove]" - again, hard coded into the front end.
3) Front end is an Access .mde file and the "developer" did not leave the .mdb. So the code is all compiled and we don't have the source.
Alas the so-called "developer" is long gone, or I would stuff my turd-polishing rag down his throat so far it would polish his turds as well.
Once I've signed out of Google, I count:
Links at top of page - 10
Surrounding the search box - 12 (or 17 if you include the buttons)
Bottom links - 9
Footer - 2
Total: 33 (38)
Sign in to iGoogle and the top links section increases to 14 words (if you count your email address as one). Then ignoring your custom content, there's another 14 words to add (Home, Add a tab, Get Artist Themes | Select Theme | Add Stuff >>, About this theme).
Total: 51 (56)
So perhaps a more accurate magic number would be 75 words?
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