Two Shiny Stories

So now we have the Google browser with a name that proves that the Septics do get irony. It's not chromy at all, but it does have two interesting stories:

• It is possible to keep big secrets for a long time. I don't know how long it took to go from concept to (beta -- surprise) release, but it can't have been less than eighteen months and even though a Google browser is a juicy story, all the news services all seem to have been taken by surprise. That's impressive. I'd like to know how they did it, and I wonder what other secrets they are keeping.
  
• Now that Google is just as wicked as Microsoft there's lost of fuss about the browser's licence and potential to phone information to Google (i.e. under the pretence of checking if the site you are visiting is phishing. But the source is under BSD so it ought to be possible for a forked "clean" version to appear on sourceforge any time. We'll see whether open source can still function without corporate support....