CivicActions

Google has announced their web browser Chrome. Many are excited while others remain skeptical. Currently I'm both; but a recent discovery has swayed me towards skeptical. Here's why.

Google Chrome is available for download from google.com/chrome. However the open source project that Google promoted so heavily in the comic book announcement is called Chromium. It's website is chromium.org which redirects to code.google.com/chromium, which is a splash page to get developers and contributors on board. Chromium's issue tracker is hosted on google code under the project chromium at code.google.com/p/chromium (Code repository and other details are on chromium.org subdomains).

This led me to ask, why is there both Chromium and Chrome? What is the difference? What's at code.google.com/p/chrome? Going to that url, google asks you to log in, then gives you a 403 forbidden error. It appears that chrome is a separate closed-source project, which without a doubt includes proprietary code in addition to chromium. What is google hiding from us? How open-source will Chrome really be?

I have tested that the 403 forbidden error is not a mishandled 404 not found error. Go to code.google.com/p/somereallyunusualprojectnamethatdoesnotexist to test for yourself.