Not even a full month has passed since the release of Google's open source browser and concerns about its security are already popping in. Chrome had received mixed reviews since its launch from the blogosphere with some even calling it a faliure for its lack of extensibility.

But until recently, no one had really questioned about the safety features in Chrome. A post on ZDNet Open Source reports that an undisclosed company has asked all its employees to stop using Google Chrome and shift back to Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. The reason? They think that there are possible security holes in the browser.

I had actually read about a security threat in Chrome a few days back, which can be traced to its Webkit Engine. But I didn't pay much attention to it as it was dependant on Java runtime and a bit of user intervention. But now since sun have released a Chrome compatible Java engine, the security threats have elevated. The hole can allow a java application to download an execute automatically (making it a good doorway for worms).

It would actually help to see that how many people will this flaw affect. From the traffic data of Sizlopedia, about 4% of total users use Google Chrome. That is significantly less than the number of users on Firefox or Internet Explorer. And out of that 4%, only a small percentage would actually have installed JRE on their systems. So the bottom line is, the security risk won't affect masses even if malicious software target it.

Apple's Safari also suffered from this same problem but it was addressed a few months back when they upgraded their version of WebKit. It would be actually interesting to see that how fast Google will respond to this issue as it appears to affect only a small number of the total users.