Google Chrome Shipping On Some OEM PCs

It seems as though Microsoft is getting the bump by some manufacturers here in the U.S,, as Sony, for one, is shipping its VAIO notebooks with Chrome as the default browser.

Everyone who reads certainly must know by now that Internet Exploder is the slowest  of the most used browsers, and it has only been in recent memory that it could make any sort of claim as being somewhat safe. Internet Exploder 8 had been sped up by a fair amount over IE7, but has recently lost ground due to reliability fixes sent out in the last 30 days.

Though that may be true, I don’t think many expected Chrome to be placed as the default, but it certainly has to do with companies like Sony grabbing some change for a little work on the assembly line.

Download Squad says that several more manufacturers are on board with jumping ship to Chrome. Why not? It makes those OEMs some dollars, and if the customer doesn’t like it, it is changed to IE easily enough.

The EC might be content with Microsoft’s browser ballot screen, but that’s not stopping Google from getting OEMs to turn away from Internet Explorer on their own.

Google already has deals with several OEMs to include their software, of course. They’ve been shipping Google Desktop on OEM pcs for quite some time now, and their plans to drop Google Chrome on new users have come to fruition as well.

As you can see, I unboxed a new Sony Vaio laptop running Windows 7 yesterday. Nestled amongst the other desktop icons was the tri-color Chrome orb.

Not only was Chrome pre-pinned to the Windows 7 taskbar, but a quick look at the internet options on the laptop revealed sad news for Internet Explorer: it had been bumped from default web browsing duties.

If we weren’t already in the middle of an all-out browser war, the introduction of Google Chrome as the preinstalled default on Windows PCs could well set things off.

While I’m all for dumping Internet Exploder like last week’s garbage, I’m not sure about the reasoning behind putting Chrome as the default. You see, for many sites, the expectation is some version of IE, and certain business sites balk on anything but IE, and lately, but still less than always, Firefox.

Certainly there is no money in using Firefox as the default, but it is going to make for happier customers, that don’t get the message that a site can’t be accessed (properly) by anything other than IE or Firefox. Since nothing is stated about it, and I have not tried out a PC that has Chrome as default, I can’t say as fact, but I feel confident that there are some support calls to Sony about getting IE back, or Firefox installed.

Hopefully those people with Chrome on their PCs as the standard browser haven’t read about the exploits to that browser that are being reported in the security section of ZDNet.

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Yes, it’s still true…