I downloaded Chrome a few weeks ago and only just discovered that it had secretly set up a scheduled task on my PC.

In fact there are two tasks, one is set to poll Google every hour.

I was going to disable them completely, but this Webmonkey article explains that doing so could result in Google's update program running as a permanent background application. This opens up an always-on tunnel to Google, which is without doubt not a good thing to allow.

Whatever you might think of Chrome, I recommend reading the article and the linked articles too if you plan to keep it on your computer.

Also FireFox SafeBrowsing contacts Google by every URL access for checking if the site is not malicious.