google_hal

A week ago Google announced their Chrome Operating System and the world quickly went into a furry over it. I as well as others have expressed anticipation, excitement, and concern, over the implications of such a thing. Whether it is being humorous or downright serious, one thing is for sure, Google would have too much control.

It really hit me today when I decided to login to my Google Finance account. I generally just use it to monitor some stock prices and one of my retirement accounts. In no way would I call this something that I rely heavily upon but as I logged in and saw the new interface I knew something was wrong. My default browser is Opera as it works the best for me, but now it does not work for Google. All of the beautiful little graphs and even the simple pages no longer displayed.

The only way to get many of Googles pages to work the way they are supposed to, is to use Google Chrome. While many of the pages are functional on other browsers there are still little things that are missing if you use the competitions browsers. What ever happened to Internet standards and general compatibility?

Microsoft is frequently accused of being anti-competitive and of having a monopoly but what about Google? Is their operating system going to take over to the point that we are all forced to use Chrome whether we like it or not? It is still a long ways away from being released and yet even now it is taking control.