Chrome by Google – Made for (almost) everyone

Google have been on a big advertising campaign on bill boards and in wrap round front cover adverts in the free ‘Metro’ newspaper of recent times.

They are touting the browser as “made for everyone” – now without being suspicious of “what’s in it for Google” (which I’ll explore below) there is the slight issue of system requirements.

For my sins I still often use a Windows 2000 based system – can I use Chrome? Not chance I need XP or greater – still w2k was superseded in 2001.

But at least I’ll be able to try it on my Mac right?

Erm no again – I need to be running Mac OS 10.5 a.k.a. Leopard  – the Mac OS variant as of late 2007 – so of no use to me with my trusty iBook with the obviously lesser big cat – Panther (a.k.a 10.3). Not that I’d be able to run Leopard if I wanted – it doesn’t support my older hardware.

Now there’s a good argument that I shouldn’t expect to run the latest greatest toys on my ‘obsolete’ hardware – but – my old windows box would happily upgrade to Win XP, but not chance of upgrading past Mac OS 10.4 on my iBook (assuming I could actually buy a copy) as Apple dropped support for older hardware such as mine.

Now for what I use it for I don’t need all the latest bells and whistles from my OS – but it is rather disappointing that Google’s browser offer rules out any Mac more than a couple of years old.

Anyway there’s still my question of “what’s in it for Google” – why are they spending mega bucks advertising Chrome. Now I don’t use iGoogle, but am aware that they will be tracking my searches made from the same browser as me (just they probably don’t know exactly who ‘I’ am.) If I get Chrome are they tracking every page I view? After all Firefox knows what sites I visiting a lot with their auto complete (I can visit some of my favourite sites by typing little more than the first two letters in the address bar) will google get to know this information if I use Chrome?