Google Chrome, the Google Browser

Philipp Lenssen writes "Google announced their very own browser project called Google Chrome — an announcement in the form of a comic book drawn by Scott McCloud, no less. Google says Google Chrome will be open source, include a new JavaScript virtual machine, include the Google Gears add-on by default, and put the tabs above the address bar (not below), among other things. I've also uploaded Google's comic book with all the details (details given from Google's perspective, anyway... let's see how this holds up). While Google provided the URL www.google.com/chrome there's nothing up there yet."

Comments

Very Interesting...

[AKAImBatman]

I imagine the first question on everyone's mind will be, "Why do we need a new web browser?" To which I imagine the truthful answer is: "We don't. At least not for technical reasons."

I believe what Google is looking to accomplish is to trade on their brand name in an attempt to further dislodge Internet Explorer.

Remember when AOL purchased Netscape? AOL didn't care about the browser in the slightest. They wanted Netscape for the brand name. To the vast majority of users, Netscape was the Internet.

Google has since taken that place. Google is the Internet to many people. So much so that Google has felt compelled to to prevent the genericizing of their mark.

In this particular case, however, the strength of their mark works to Google's advantage. They have already convinced millions of users to install their desktop software. If they can further convince millions of users to install and use their browser, they can cause enough of a disruption to finally remove IE's leadership in the browser market. Especially given the solid work already done by FireFox, Opera, and Safari. With only another 10% marketshare loss on the whole, even the most stubborn websites will be forced to support third party browsers. And once they support third party browser, it will be very little time before the technological superiority of the alternative browsers causes them to add special features not available for Internet Explorer users.

It will be Netscape vs. Internet Explorer all over again. Except that instead of two giants fighting it out, it will be Microsoft against everyone else. And when everyone else happens to be giants in their own right, Microsoft's prospects will start looking rather grim.

In effect, this move is a blow aimed squarly at Redmond. Not for the purposes of truth, justice, and the freedom of all mankind; as I'm sure many will imagine. Rather, for the purpose of hitting back at Microsoft for their attempts to leverage their monopoly in promoting MSN Search over Google. The only difference is that Google Search is a good product and it is entrenched. Internet Explorer hasn't been a good product since Microsoft stopped developing it nearly 8 years ago (piss-poor upgrades pretending to be standards-compliant not withstanding), and its entrenchments are slowly falling to competition.

Re:Very Interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the question on my mind is what's going to happen to Mozilla? As I remember, they get most of their backing from Google generously paying for the traffic they get from Mozilla's search plugin. If Google cancels that deal (and they very well might, if they have a competing browser), Mozilla will lose most of its cash-flow very suddenly.

So with fierce competition from webkit and Opera and a lot less money all of a sudden, and a browser from Google that does anything just as well as FF does it and a few things better, Mozilla may be left struggling. This may not be such a terrible thing, Mozilla grew from nothing, it could be an important lesson to go back there, but they may not survive going from being one of the best funded web browsers to one of the worst funded web browsers in just a few months.

Re:Very Interesting...

[AKAImBatman]

They've been trying to push applications on the web, and the speed hasn't been completely impressive.

Safari, FireFox, and Opera (in that order) have been showing marked improvements in Javascript performance. To the point where Javascript performance is a major point of competition. Microsoft's JScript engine is currently the slowest Javascript engine on the browser market. (As I can personally attest after running sophisticated sorting algorithms through it.) So the problem still comes back to Internet Explorer.

Re:Very Interesting...

[Firehed]

That's certainly true to a point; however, rigging up a monetized Google Custom Search is all of five minutes work. The behavior to a search at google.com is a tiny bit different (you can also weight the results with keywords; I find this quite helpful for my development work), but the biggest change for them would be that they'd have to change the default home page from google.com/mozillasearch to mozilla.com/googlesearch, and the search box accordingly.

Do know that the Google search isn't anything near their only source of funding. The Amazon search in that top-right search box is an Amazon Affiliate search - tag=mozilla-20 gets added into your Amazon search URL, and they get a minimum of 4% of the purchase price provided you went through their affiliate link last (I don't see why people gripe about this kind of thing so often, it only costs Amazon money, not the purchaser). With the volume that probably does, it's more like 6-8% on most items.

I'm sure that there are plenty of other sources of income for Mozilla, though I'd expect those are the biggest two. And both are structured in such a way that they'd have to be personally blocked from using the affiliate program (unlikely, especially given the bad press), or the program itself would have to be shut down entirely (even more unlikely, as half the internet gets its funding from these things).

Re:Very Interesting...

[arth1]

if you actually think about it, the address bar really *does* belong under the tab bar.

Judging by the rest of your post, what you really mean is that the address bar does belong with the page. But so do tabs. The active tab is directly connected with the page that's displayed.

Since both the address bar and the tabs both can't be right above the page proper, another solution is then to place either the tabs or the address bar below the page. Yes, below it. Or place the tabs at the side, like most normal books with tabs.

Personally, I'd like to see the address bar at the bottom, which fits with the GUI paradigm of a shell, where your input is always at the bottom, or instant messaging programs, where the input is at the bottom, or line editors, where -- you catch my drift.
But people are easily confused, and probably too used to the URL field being at the top, so it might be better to place the tabs at the bottom (or the sides).

Re:Very Interesting...

[Khuffie]

I believe IE8 already does that (runs tabs as separate processes)

Ex-Firefox developers

[Ed Avis]

Did anyone else notice the number of current or former Firefox developers name-checked in that comic? Ben Goodger was the Firefox project lead until recently. The most significant part of this news may be that Google is pulling people off Firefox development (assuming they were contributing to Firefox while working there) and getting them to write a new browser. Still, Firefox is working pretty well and their financial future is secure for the next few years - thanks to wads of cash from Google - so we need not be too worried.

Apart from that, my verdict is 'show us the code'. Announcements of future plans and vapourware are not really interesting, even when it's Google.

Designing browser as if it were an OS

[anaesthetica]

Based on Page 4, Google is designing the browser as if it were an operating system. This is something that I commented on previously in the discussion of Microsoft's approach to IE8. Going from shared memory to protected memory was a big step for multitasking on the desktop, and since web applications are more and more complex, the same move needs to be made with browser design.

If IE8 and "Google Chrome" are moving in this direction, what will we see from Safari and Firefox? Safari 4 betas give no indication of a fundamental re-architecting. Firefox 4 is still at least a year away, and so far no one in that community has been publicly talking about this kind of redesign. And Opera... who knows?