Google spiced up things in the browser world recently by releasing their own (beta) standalone web browser called Chrome.  Interestingly enough, the name seems to derive from the Mozilla Firefox term for the user interface layer.  The code is based on WebKit and V8, as part of Google’s Chromium project, operating under a permissive BSD license.  There may be some confusion here, since Chromium is BSD-licensed, but Chrome itself seems not to be.

So does it mean that we’re seeing the return of the browser wars?  Maybe a bit.

IE is still going to be on more systems, by virtue of inclusion on the most common pre-installed OS’s.  But some analysts have noted that Google doesn’t need to “beat IE” in market share in order for Chrome to be effective.  Rather, Google intends to influence the direction and feature-set of future browsers by providing their own freely-available, freely-applicable version.  Core features are going to include powerful, reliable javascript interpretation and XML parsing, of the kind you might need for, say, Google Docs or Google Gears web applications.  That is to say, this is the browser that intends from the beginning to be an application base, not just a page viewer with additional features strapped on.

In the long term, one might expect Google to use Chrome to make it easier for them to place ads more intelligently and reliably.  Eventually, it is conceivable they might go whole hog and mint their own linux distro, thereby cutting directly at Microsoft’s main advantage in establishing IE’s userbase.  It is quite interesting how the competitive strategies tie into each other at various levels.

The main downside for web developers now is having another level of cross-browserness to test against… and the potential privacy implications when relying on Google for so many aspects of business.  Note also, the current beta is Win32/64 only.  MacOS and Linux versions pending.

So it looks like this will be the week of the new browsers for me, talking my XP virtual machine to IE7, FF3 and now Chrome.

Tags: chrome, chromium, firefox, Google, google chrome

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 2:43 am by atz and is filed under Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.