1. Adblock for Chrome – This has been around for a while, yes, and it’s been installed for a while.
2. Personal Blocklist (by Google) – This I’ve just discovered today (I think it was made available today) and this is something I’ve been wanting in Google search results for a very long time. This plugin gives you an option to block domains from Google search results. Say “bye-bye” to those stupid content farms. This also sends block information back to Google so that they can further tune their anti-content-farm algorithms. The only shortcoming of this is that the extension’s data still doesn’t sync to my Google account which means I’d have to add each domain in on each instance of Chrome, which isn’t a deal breaker, but I can’t wait to everything just automagically works everywhere.
3. RSS Live Links – This is, by far, the most important thing for me. I have a bunch of “daily” links set up through del.icio.us and setup through Firefox as live links so that I can open my browser, click one button and have all my important links open. This was not available on Chrome for a while. I just found this extension today.

And with the RSS Live Links extension, I am content enough with Chrome to get rid of Firefox for my daily browsing needs. Congrats Google, you’ve won again. No amount of Firefox 4 is going to convince me to switch back to it.

Hot off the heals of the latest internet uproar dealing with Google and the End User License Agreement for Google Chrome, I’ve been thinking a lot about this licensing business. What I have to say is not coming from a legal background, rather coming from a much more “open source” background.

When I dug into the EULA of Google Chrome, I was a bit more than pissed off about (from the EULA):

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

Now right off the bat, I decided against using Google Chrome for anything more than viewing sites like www.digg.com and putting it through the Acid2 test. After that I was going to uninstall it. All I really wanted to see is the speed difference and things of that nature. Obviously I couldn’t use this for work and I decided against using it for a personal use.

After lunch the next day (yesterday) I decided against uninstalling it. I really didn’t mind Google using anything I put up on the internet anyway since I don’t even know how many other sites do the same thing. For personal, daily use, I have no problem using Chrome as my browser. I just had to make sure to avoid using it at work as well as not use it when posting code from personal projects (though all code I write for personal reasons will be open sourced under a Gnu Public License anyways). Frankly if any of my content is ever used by Google, I’d be pretty happy.

Then I remembered this blog. Yes it’s been a while, but it is still my blog and my content. How do I feel about Google being able to use my blog posts? Pictures on here? I decided to formalize my blog postings and finally put up a license for the contents of my blog, which you can find under the “Legal” text on the right sidebar (as of 2008-09-04).

Information such as these blog posts and code should be for everyone to be used as the author dictates.

Now in Google’s defense, they have admitted mistake and plan on retroactively fixing this, which is fantastic. So, much applause to Google.

** UPDATE ** Google has now updated their EULA for Chrome and explained why that part was in there to begin with.