A recent blog post was linked to by Payment News today regarding the potential that the new Google Chrome beta release web browser could bring to online banking. Unfortunately, neither the blog author or the Payment News brief link to the blog post thought through the many ways that such things have been suggested, accomplished, and failed at in the past. Read the rest of this post for my responses to the original ideas posted on the blog article about Chrome.

• "eliminate phishing:  a secure standalone secure browser only for online banking, and nothing else.  Any bank could use and develop provided all enhancements are freely shared with the community, ie everyone." - This has already been attempted, but banks and online merchants are slow to adopt the technology. It is called Firefox 3, it ALREADY provides additional SSL and anti-phishing techniques, is open source, works on all three major systems (Microsoft, Apple OS X, and Linux variants), and implements new SSL features that require significant FBI and other security checks to receive certification for when displaying the "green bar" in the address bar of the browser. (Very similar features are in IE7 too, but community support isn't as strong as it is for Firefox)
• "eliminate (ok reduce) credit problems:  several banks collaborate on local financial advice centres in every city" - How would a browser improve customer's ability to manage their financial lives???
• "eliminate identity theft:  banks collaborate and develop IDtheftfree Inc -  a system to disallow provision of credit bureau information to company or Bank unless it comes through IDtheftfree Inc.  The new system has rights and authorities that are controlled only by each consumer.  Credit bureau information becomes controlled by the consumer instead of the credit bureaus.  By power of union, force the Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian to co-operate.  Build a secure version of the thing they can’t (won’t) effectively build." - This goal is impossible to achieve. This is the same concept behind ICANN or W3C, and these organizations, while helpful, have in no way proved immutably stalwart in their objectivity. Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, and others have all found ways to bend the rules or apply purchasing pressure to others to have their goals met while leaving others behind. Open source gets us much closer to a collaborative environment, but Chrome is certainly not the first type of mainstream software project to be open source. Firefox, Apache, Linux, and many other projects are very popular both amongst consumers and businesses, but common security, data sharing, and privacy standards and operating procedures are still a utopian dream.

Google's Chrome web browser may appear to be an interesting "new way of surfing the Internet" to the casual technology user, but it does not yet offer a truly revolutionary way of keeping our personal finances safe from harm.