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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.
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.
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.
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 we don't want to support outdated, buggy implementations.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.
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
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!
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.
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