SlickGeek Slicker than slick.

With the official release of version 1 of Google Chrome, Google’s browser is now ready for prime time after 14 weeks of being in beta. With the quick adoption rate, claimed to be over 10 million active users worldwide, comes the equally growing concern of user’s privacy. With each installion, the browser creates a unique identifier that can be used to tracker user’s browsing habits. This is nothing new if you’re one of those people that are currently using Google toolbar.

Chrome has been praised for its speediness and unique features, like the ability to run each tabs as separate process, so if it crashes, only that tab need to be restarted and not the whole browser like the majority of browsers out there.

Concerns about what Google Chrome does with user data already spawned SRWare Iron, a browser based on the Chromium source code that strips various features like error and crash reporting, as well as the unique user identifier assigned to each install. If you’d prefer to run Google’s version of the browser but are still concerned about your privacy, you can also download and run UnChrome. It’s a free application that checks to see if you’ve got Chrome installed and then replaces the unique ID assigned to you with a null value.

So now that you’re (relatively) safer, give Chrome a try, if you haven’t already, and see how it fairs against your current browser of choice.