Doesn’t it boil down to Google’s vs. Microsoft’s peace of mind? (to put it non-belligerently)

Microsoft has always feared that operating systems might move to the web (and with that in mind, crushed Netscape a decade back). Google has always feared Microsoft’s grip on browsers could be used against it (just as it had done with Netscape) – which explains why it has injected quite a lot of time, effort and money into Firefox.

However, Google decided this strategy didn’t give it enough peace of mind and that building its own browser was the only real way of controlling the game. Google defines itself as ’search, ads and apps’ – the third element (the apps, esp. the ones that run on the web) being the operative one. If they run on the web, then they need a browser explicitly built for them. Enters Chrome, declaring a pre-emptive war against Mircosoft and striving for a world where everyone stops caring about the operating systems of their machines altogether. A better world presumably.

Cleverly (Google are always very clever), Chrome is open source. What does that mean? for it to be a success, it doesn’t need to be mass market (and they haven’t built it to make money off it directly). If it’s built into other browsers (and even used in future versions of IE) that in itself will be deemed a success by Google. All it wants is to secure a larger proportion of people using the web and ideally, more of its web apps (and services). And that, would lead to a very happy ending indeed (for Google, and hopefully also for app-hungry users like most people on this thread

But as for the majority of UK users? I’ve asked a few people and, of my colleagues, most of them don’t even know what a browser *is*. Yes they’ve heard the phrase “Internet Explorer” but had no idea there are alternatives available or why one might want to use them. IE = the Internet = Google to most people in the street. That google are offering some sort of new thing to download is making things more complicated than they need to be.

I’m asked the question “Okay, so what does this thing do that the normal Internet doesn’t?” and saying “Well, it’s faster” just won’t convince someone to install something new.

More here: http://mediaquake.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/chrome-could-make-a-g-phone-more-powerful/

Even though Google has announced that the referrals scheme has been closed (to the public), I’d hazard a strong guess that it won’t be long before we see Chrome pre-installed on systems too.

In my opinion it is a fantastic browser – its just a question of how long will it take before we see some useful addons for it.

Cheers, Ramzi

Yeah, me neither

Though Google have a track-record for releasing good products and under promoting them though, i.e. Google Talk and Google Video. Will this one fall to the wayside, or will they promote it full-on via their homepage as has already been suggested? If it does, it’ll change the browser world, forever!

Having played with Chrome for the past few hours, it is a fantastic and very quick browser. It will probably replace Firefox for me as my day-to-day browser. Firefox will stay my web development/design browser due to its addons, IE will stay for ActiveX sites, and Opera and Safari will stay for testing purposes.

With its single type-in bar and freeing up most of the monitor space, this could be the browser of choice on embedded systems such as PVRs etc as they move to take advantage of video-on-demand.

This will be interesting.

This is Google’s first operating system

Read the comic and it’s a helpful dose of open-source altruism (not to mention some ah, confident, exposition) from their smart developers.

But one would suspect this is part of a greater plan. e.g. Wall Street considered it somewhat favourably (for a few hours at least )

@Liam, can you opt out. Yes.

@Marcus, support another browser? As the rendering engine is based on WebKit I doubt it’ll require extra work to support the CSS.. on the JS front they’ve rolled their own engine, V8. Hopefully it won’t have to many issues!

@Lode, the plugins for Firefox that you talk off are IMHO the reason Mozilla have not switched to WebKit already.

Looking forward to it, I hope it lives up to the buzz.

This totally and utterly overshadows the [not so] impending release of IE8 and highlights the fact that whilst a large company such as Google is able to continue innovating, Microsoft is quite simply NOT.

Google > MS

Look out for improved versions of gmail, calendar, etc running on Chrome as an reason to switch.

All left for the IE, Safari, FF, Opera camps is trying to adapt and top it (perhaps using an “embrace and extend” strategy in the cases of IE and Safari).

Some more arguments and notes on my blog: http://www.numlock.ch/news/it/some-techie-notes-about-google-chrome/