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Will Google Launch A Browser?
ServeYourWorld writes "The
New York Post is reporting that 'Based on the half-dozen hires in recent
weeks, Google appears to be planning to launch its own Web browser and other software
products to challenge Microsoft.' I took a guess and did a whois search for Gbrowser.com
and indeed Google Inc. is listed as the registrar."
Let's just hope that Gmail still works with other browsers.
It would be a dream come true if someone could compete with Microsoft. But Google? Google, out of anyone, I least expected.
The best and brightest in search engine companies gets woken up by others' efforts (see earlier articles about Verisign and Microsoft) to capitalize on a market by hijacking the browser, so they develop their own?
bk
Im sure it will be mentioned alot, but what is the real purpose of doing that. Competition is always a good thing but wouldn;t it be better if they backed a certain browser we all know and love ;) instead?
fp?
From the article:
Already, its Gmail free e-mail system gives users 100 megabytes of storage space on a remote network -- providing consumers a virtual hard drive.
Since when did 100mb = 1 gig?
If they propagated a Mozilla-based browser such as Firefox to their users. At one time I was a defender of Google, always citing their mantra of "Don't be evil," however I'm not quite sure what their intentions may be.
Best search engine? Perhaps. But let's leave it at that.
Don't be blinded by the generosity; they're potentially gearing up to be just as wicked of a monopoly as Microsoft. Whether their intentions are clear or not, that probably should not be happening, since too much power has a tendency to corrupt -- except under very exceptional circumstances.
Google has a tremendous name recognition, but this seems outside of its core strength.
Why should Google do its own browser? Why not just come along side an existing browser in some kind of partnership? Instead, they are simply dividing up the already fragmented non-Microsoft browser landscape. If they added worked with an existing browser, maybe even renaming it to take advantage of the brand name, adding some polish, they could make a serious dent in IE.
I think this is a tactical error on their part. And when P/E ratios are in the triple digits, it only takes one to bring the cards down (for the investors at least).
Wow. Considering how the GMail invite scene was early on, I can only imagine what the beta for GBrowser will be like.
Well considering the demise in market share of IE and the rise of alternative browsers - eg Opera, Firefox, Mozilla etc.... it would seem smart to bring out a browser.
:P
Anyway - the way the beta system used to work was that it was invite only.... after all some people don't know how to write bug reports.
Video Game cheats, hints a
Actually, a web based browser isn't such a bad idea - think about it for a sec.
Develop a low cost cheap display mechanism that communicates over modems or tcp/ip (ie: high speed) and that only communicates to one service.
That one service would then have their own software running a browser, email, search engine etc.
Things that make you say, hmmmmm....
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
Considering IE still has quite a lot of market share and once Microsoft's currently-vaporware search service gets around to launching it will likely promptly be highly "integrated" with every computer in the world running both IE and Windows Update... it would seem smart to bring out a browser.
from the article:
The concept floundered, but programmers note that Google could easily pick up the ball. Already, its Gmail free e-mail system gives users 100 megabytes of storage space on a remote network -- providing consumers a virtual hard drive.
spot the deliberate mistake?
liqbase
Why couldn;t they just branch the code from the Mozilla trunk and start on their own version?
Basically Apple took the code from KHTML, made it into WebKit, and then gave back some to the community. I wouldn't put it past Google to take this exact same strategy.
The key is tying the apps to the browser. If its just yet-another gecko browser, this will have limited impact.
Things like a decent word proccessor, spreadsheet, email client (linked with gmail), chat program, etc. A whole office suite, but one that is (cached locally) loaded over the internet. Of course security/feature updates would be automatatic, and you could use your 1gb of gmail space to also store files created by, or uploaded to, the office suite.
The apps themselves would have to be platform independent, which I guess would mean java, and the browser itself should install via some sort of super easy and fast webpage. The browser should be a modified version of some GPL program, like Firefox or Konqueror, so there would be hope of decent security and platform independence.
Safari has a google search field right in the nav bar...
Firefox has a google search field right in the nav bar...
A significant number of IE users use GoogleBar...
Why even bother making a web browser? At the moment, if it isn't IE, it's effectively Google. And even if it is IE, it's possibly Google.
Moreover, how do we know that Google's actually hiring these people to make a new web browser? Maybe they're being hired to make a new and improved version of GoogleBar, or something neat and different we haven't even thought of.
And if it is a browser it's probably going to be a branded version of Firefox. I don't really think four people is enough to write an html rendering engine all by themselveses.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Then, lets say 6 months later, google only allows the googlebrowser and IE to access google.com (with a deal where MS pays google big bucks). Lets assume google still dominates, it could be 2+ years before a viable alternative exists.
This is an absurd theory. The only rational reason that Google would do such a thing is if they believed they could make more money from the browser then they can from the search engine. Since that's a highly unlikely notion, it would be silly for them try this.
The brains behind Gooogle have been very smart and have shown that building with open standards is a very good business model. Why would you think that just because they are now public, they would throw out everything they have learned in the past, and all of the goodwill that they have earned-- all for a scheme that would be almost certain to drive them out of business overnight?
The company also hired four people who worked on Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer, and later founded their own company. One of them, Adam Bosworth, is credited with being a driving force not only behind IE, but Microsoft's database-management program, Access.
Shit, Google's browser won't follow standards either.
True, IE does have the lion's share of the browser market.
Interestingly enough, I reported on "user agents" at work today. Our web-based systems are used by many corporations throughout the world. All users are authenticated, and we strongly discourage robots. We stipulate that our users use "modern browsers"... we don't want to support outdated, buggy implementations.
[I still can't imagine that web designers don't design for all modern browsers. We have a large and sophisticated application costing millions, and I have to say that it cost about $100 to make sure that we could support just about everyone]
In any case, in my business, the IE6 market is almost exactly 67%. A year ago such a low number for IE was unthinkable. Happily, IE4 and IE5 combined are now well below 2%. [We don't support IE4 - piece of junk. IE5 is junky too: my case was to drop support, which I won.]
There are some NS4 users remaining, but only a handful [unsupported]. Mozilla and Firefox have, of course, taken a huge chunk of IE's business. Safari is a strong player on the Mac front, but it still has market to gain to completely overshadow IE5/Mac. The Mozilla family is fairly popular on the Mac, but Safari is still leading the way.
All the other browsers combined are less than 5%. That included Opera, Konqueror, Lynx, and other oddities and unknowns.
Then had a crazy idea.
/me goes back to sleep, leaves stupid dreamland.
Imagine: The Google Desktop Environment.
Complete with Gbrowser, the universal filemanager/web browser/gmail client, uber everything all rolled into one.
Windows, Linux, Mac versions available now.
*shivers*
And, of course, all your 'google' apps are all cross-platform, since the client is all crazy java/web stuff anyways.
Sorta google toolbar on steroids.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I'm surprised this wasn't picked up sooner, actually... some time ago I had heard, via a contact at Google, that they were in talks with Mozilla.org (the very same people whose developer day they apparently just hosted, yes?) to develop a Google-branded version of the Firefox browser, adding on things like GMail and more specialized Google searches. There had been talk of shooting for Firefox 1.0, so perhaps now that the release is getting closer, the idea is becoming more serious. Such a branded distro could, even more than Netscape/Mozilla, be an interesting demonstration of the flexibility of Firefox vs IE, though, and not as new an idea as it may seem- it would also let Google send their little piggy to market much sooner than starting from scratch.
Gee, we already have a bunch of open-source web browsers that are pretty good, and getting better. Maybe that's not such a great market to jump into. If I was Google, I probably wouldn't.
Then again, one place that we don't have a lot of tools for is searching our own hard disks. If I type in a couple words, I can find 100 references to web pages with that information in a second; it still takes ages to search my local disk. (Does that seem backwards to anybody else?) Most disks are huge, have plenty of free space, and most processors sit idle most of the time.
Now, Apple is solving part of this problem for Mac OS X with Tiger, for release next year. Microsoft is talking about solving part of this in Longhorn, in a few years. Various open-source projects are taking a shot at this (Storage, etc.).
Wouldn't it make more sense that they're working on a sort of local-Google? Imagine if you could steal not only Microsoft's thunder, but Apple's and Linux's as well -- wouldn't you? (Especially if you had, oh, say, an IPO...)
It really does. It seems logical that since most people just assume Google is the only search engine anyway, that a Google Browser would seem to be a logical step in the company's progression.
HOWEVER, I am a little worried that at some point, people want so much to fight one monster that they create another to combat it.
Google search, GMAIL, the big IPO, GBrowser........GOffice for your web based DOC sharing, etc, etc, etc.
I like Google Search and I like GMAIL, but at the same time, whenever I see a company heading down the road to tell me that I should use them for my "complete online computing experience", I do feel a little uncomfortable.
I am not saying that is the case, and I am not saying any of this is bad. I like what Google is doing right now because new innovation is a good thing. But at the same time, I am aware of another company that wants everything I use to have their name attached to it and I am always keeping both eyes open.
Please note that the registrar is http://www.markmonitor.com whose raison d'etre is protection of intellectual property. It could be as simple as Google trying to prevent anyone else from registering gbrowser.com and using it to make a quick buck. Or that plus a good way to keep their future options open. I'm not sure Google needs Microsoft declaring all-out war on them so soon after their IPO.
I don't know why everyone is so obsessed with space. There can't possibly be that much email worth keeping. Do people keep every junk mail that comes to their home? I have never heard someone say "I need to buy more real estate because my house is too small for junk mail"
Really, what prevents Google from making cosmetic changes to Firefox/Mozilla. There is already the built in Google Search. Perhaps they would integrate a Gmail mail client.
Or perhaps, I'm talking out my ass.
Spellchecking as you go (and other client-side things) for g-mail?
Recommending pages you might like by feeding your history/bookmarks into a central database?
Making google's web index more complete by flagging unindexed pages to HQ?
None of the aboue sound very convincing reasons to write a browser to me, However, Firefox + some bells & whistles with the Google name and clout behind it could kill IE stone dead... and the wide adoption of an ad-blocking browser would push advertisers towards google text ads in their droves.
The $64,000 question is, would this 'be evil'?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Just because we on Slashdot are _all_ using Linux, we can assume that this Google web browser will be offered _for_linux?
Smart? In what way? All I see here is the beginning of the end of Google as we knew it.
Timeline as I see it: Google does good innovative work, launches IPO, jumps on the "me too" bandwagon looking to brand anything it can wherever there is a vaguely related market. There's another large brand I can think of that does this... *Cough* MSN *Cough*.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Well, I meant to comment on my search engine statement. All the search engines crawl the internet hitting as many sites as they can. sometimes they hit the same site multiple times in one day. As we know from a good slashdotting, many sites have limited bandwidth per month. If there are too many search engines I can see it putting a hit on many smaller sites as well as generally slowing down the whole web. Obviously we are not at the point, but it could happen. Lots of people write home brew search engines for programming experience or college projects. Those people may decide to enter the market themselves one day. Before you know it there could be a considerable amount of web traffic due to just spidering sites.
Apple has an image browser called gBrowser. Wonder if that will cause problems with the naming of a google browser...
http://homepage.mac.com/schwarz/gbrowser.html
If you must!
And if everyone just stuck with standards, browsers would have to be judged on things like stability, speed, and general non-suckiness. We wouldn't want that.
On a side note, "Google: The Service that Launched a Google of Browsers".
It seems Microsoft had good reason to fear a non-OS dependent service becoming dominant. Too bad for them they didn't notice Google until it was too late.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
have it operate in full-screen mode on IE and gecko, imagine having your favorites, history, interface layout, etc. all available wherever you go and on any system you use, perhapse with different types of interfaces to handle missing features on the client, such as a text/frames mode, full jscript for major browsers, etc.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Actually, that's an interesting idea.
A Google browser could be a minimal window (or no window at all, using XUL) which points at browser.google.com, which contains the interface.
This seperation of the interface from the engine would allow Google to rapidly improve the interface without having to get users to download updates.
Barto
I don't see any ads in Opera. Oh, that's right, I actually don't mind paying for commercial software that I enjoy and support!
:)
Seriously, Opera kicks the shit out of Mozilla. Every major innovation Opera has spawned--gestures, tabbed browsing, popup blocking--were all ripped off by Mozilla and are now hailed as Mozilla innovations. Opera's download size is tiny, it's memory footprint is small, and it is FAST. Even changing themes takes less then a second.
I'm a very happy Opera user.
I'm pretty sure that falls under "evil", and they wouldn't do it.
But really: would it be so bad? Any web site that you can't find either through Google or clicking from somewhere else is likely to be so badly organized as to be barely worth reading. And as Raph says, Google response times are very competitive with DNS.
OK, obviously web developers need to be able to enter URLs, and intranets need special handling. But beyond that...
In fact, that's a pretty good idea. I'm going to disable the Location bar and see how I go using only Google.
A browser with online storage of profile settings. Possibly with a light-weight download. I have different browsers at home, work, friends house etc. And I like having my plugins and so forth. With lazy loading, storing stuff like that online is very useful given todays bandwidths.
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
Is all about branding. Google is just extending the branding, and in the way improving a bit existing products (like gmail).
Many people use google and they will use anything that has been "googelised". If the take firefox and call it something else and put the google branding on it, it will be a IE killer.
If they start extending via XPI to support IM and gmail and all the other online stuff that they have, then why stop there? they will be competing with Microsoft (and apple) on the desktop. Can anyone imagine a googelised version of Linux?
Oh, I see a Gecko- (or KHTML-) based browser as quite a likely alternative.
Firstly, art of Google's much-hyped corporate philosophy is 'don't be evil'. With that in mind, are they going to trust their brand to MSIE's security record? XPSP2 appears to be a major improvement, but it's still not in the same zip code as 'secure'. Gecko/KHTML seem to be much closer to the mark.
Second, the 'don't be evil' directive would seem to point towards wanting a standards-compliant solution, not a 'standards? what for?' solution.
Third, their history is pro-standards, pro-open APIs: Blogger is XHTML+CSS, and largely (if not entirely) valid. They also implemented the soon-to-be-standardized Atom as their primary syndication API, rather than the wilder-and-woolier RSS. Seems to me that history points more towards an OSS/standards-compliant solution rather than an MSIE shell.
Third, it isn't exactly a secret that MS sees Google as a threat. MS's history being what it is, would a company in their sights roll out a service/product based entirely on MS technology? With as many smart people as Google has, I'm not so sure they would.
Fourth, I don't think the cost of development personnel would have anything to do with it. Google's hiring practices are almost as famous as Microsoft's: they go for the very brightest available (one thing you can't say about Microsoft is that they hire dumbasses--or even just smart foks; they hire scary-smart folks). I don't see any reason they'd change that practice for a browser.
Finally, I don't know as the Google toolbar is evidence one way or another. The toolbar has been implemented (including PageRank) in a Mozilla extension already. I can see Google not much caring about other browsers previously as Moz's market share was teensy-to-non-existent when the Google Toolbar was released, Safari wasn't released yet, NN4 was a nightmare and IIRC neither it nor Opera were anywhere near as extensible as IE at the time. Gecko UAs are just now showing up in sufficient numbers to take seriously, but with a Google toolbar already available why bother?
The only strong counter-argument I see is compatibility: lots of 2nd-tier sites -- and a few 1st-tier sites -- are indifferent to hostile to non-IE/Win browsers and standards. I can see Google being loathe to tarnish their brand by releasing a browser that a whole lot of people would see as broken because it doesn't work with site X, Y or Z.
Still, I think the argument for a non-IE browser is stronger than the argument for an IE shell.
Just an idea.
You obviously have no QA or Development experience, do you? Maybe in your area coding for "all modern browsers" is trivial, but in many areas it is not. The changes just between versions of IE 4, 5, and 6 are fairly large from a design point of view. If you're throwing in Mozilla, Firefox, etc support, that adds a lot.
I couldn't agree more with this. A lot of people trivialize browser compatibility when it comes to web design - they either say "oh, just design to standards, and everything should work!" or they say "oh, just design to the lowest common denominator - if something doesn't work on one browser, just don't do it at all."
Well, the problem with the first approach is it just plainly doesn't work. Whether or not something should work a particular way in a particular browser doesn't matter - it's whether or not it does work that matters. Every browser renders CSS a little differently, for example; even the functions that actually do work across browsers just look different depending on which browser you're running.
The problem with the second approach is that it leaves you with basically HTML 2.0 to work with. And honestly, that's fine for some sites (it really is), but if you want to do anything at all interesting, it's just not workable.
So the only thing you can really do is just design and code a site for the most popular browser out there and then hope it works with the others. If it doesn't, you try to fix it so it does - but depending on what you're doing, it may not even be possible without tossing what you've done and starting over (and then when you're done re-doing everything, some other browser that worked before will probably be broken with the new implementation).
My last job was working in the new media division of a major game publisher (you can guess which one if I tell you it's the only one doing anything interesting on the web). We designed all of our sites in-house. We built for IE, because up until I left it was about 95% of our audience, and then we QA'd for other browsers (this was generally my job; I was the militant browser dude on staff). Invariably, there were things that either didn't work or worked differently than we'd intended on certain browsers. Most of the time these things could be fixed but it was not always trivial, and it was usually one of three things that caused the problem: CSS, JavaScript, or Flash action scripting.
At the end of any particular project we'd usually spend at minimum several days troubleshooting browser problems. Given that we were in-house you can't really put a dollar value on that, but if you just divided up all of our salaries for that time period I guarantee you're talking tens of thousands of dollars on every project. That's time we could otherwise be spending creating something new instead of stuck fixing something that's otherwise finished, or it's time we could have otherwise used for things we'd have to contract freelancers for (so it did directly cost us money in many cases, and way more than $100).
It's easy to say "well you should have just used standards" and it's easy to blame it all on IE but that's way too simplistic. Because for one thing, in marketing you're not just going to put up a site full of text, you need to use things for which there are no standards, such as Flash. Honestly, if somebody invented something open-source and standardized that does everything Flash can do, and then they managed to convince the world to run browsers supporting it, we'd have jumped all over it. But Flash is what it is; it's proprietary and unfortunately there's nothing else comparable that's popular. So you have to design in Flash, and when you've got, for example (and this actually happened to us), a button in your Flash that is supposed to open a file dialogue box on your machine and it works on IE and works on Firefox and works on Opera but doesn't work on Mozilla and doesn't work on Safari, what are you supposed to do? If you've got an inte
Back before Microsoft got involved, Netscape had a near monopoly on browsing. They were the de-facto standard. Today, Google is pretty much the de-facto standard for search though I doubt they have as much market share as Netscape did back then.
Behold the power of bundling with Windows. Netscape is no more. Why? Because Microsoft controlled the gateway through which people accessed their software. Given the noises MS has been making about competing "strongly" with Google lately, they must be scared the same would happen to them except via IE instead of the operating system.
So, they want to produce their own browser, so it gets market share. That way nothing Microsoft does to IE (integrated search etc) can hurt them too much, because not many people are using IE.
It would make sense for them to base it on Firefox. It's a best-of-breed browser, portable, and is going places. But, it lacks marketing! While the current Mozilla efforts are commendable, they'd be nothing compared to being promoted on the Google webpages.
At least, this is the reasoning I'd use if I were them. It's not so much to branch out into new business, as to protect existing ones ...
they also need to present their browser as having something that neither firefox nor IE have.
By virtue of its huge central storage capacity and search engine, Google can add features that no other browser easily can.
It could also, perhaps for a fee, extend blogger.com with additional security features to allow mutli-user creation and editing of documents on line. For this purpose Amaya, an open source browser to create and update documents directly on the Web, might be the browser to emulate or extend.
Google is now spidering and indexing the whole Web. With content management features added to the browser, some of the Web could simply move to Google and cut out all the spidering.
Please excuse my typos. I gather you can understand my intent; however, I don't have much time to proof-read today.
Note that Blogger is mostly a seperate entity, which just happens to be owned by Google. Gmail and their bread-and-butter - the search engine itself - have horrible code. They still use tabular layouts, CSS and javascript served in the head (rather than externally), font tags, unescaped ampersands, and other uncompliant code (and it's all easy to fix without breaking compatibility).
Well, that's pre-standards support and not standards support. MS did the same thing with HTML, CSS, XSLT, and other standards. As a result, they are stuck with those noncompliant behaviors. I hope the same doesn't happen with Blogger. (I think they are smart enough not to make those mistakes.)
Also, it is not a crime to implement RSS. It was standardized many times. The problem is that the only version written by a group - RSS 1.0 - was ignored by the biggest RSS supporter at the time: Userland. Furthermore, many RSS feeds don't validate, and the language itself has problems. Sound familier......like HTML. That's the reason Atom has so much broad support so early in its developement (to not make the same mistakes as with (X)HTML).
it is true that Google hires more Ph.D.s than most companies. However, that means that 1) Google as a company will want to hire as few employees as possible for any one job. 2) They would be more interested in more scholarly projects - e.g. file systems, AI, protocols - than mudane projects like a browser: a shell over a pre-existing engine (where the interesting stuff happens). I think that the origional spartan interface to Google was more due to the scientists not being interested in it rather than a conscious effort at simplicity. After all, most people who get advanced degrees hate not using their specialized knowledge.
Mozilla's google toolbar extension is based on many undocumented hacks (some pretty bad) - much like Linux's NTFS support. It works, but not necessarily forever. At best, it is an unoffical clone. At worst, it infringes on Google's "look and feel." And just as GPL developers tend to stay clear of working on proprietary code for fear of "unintentional contamination," I gather that proprietary developers tend to do the same. (Tho I think the "unintentional contamination" issue is based more on FUD than reality.)
So I don't see Google reimplementing the toolbar from scratch for Mozilla, Safari, or Opera. They likely won't modify the existing open source tools without hiring an entirely new team. The Free versions will probably never be offically reconized by Google, and a policy to keep them working may never be written. Depressing.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome