Google's Shiny New Browser

Welcome to the chrome. A quick summary for everyone who doesn't want to read about it:
- Built on Webkit (aka Safari, aka Konquerer)
- Multi-process rather than multi-threaded
- K3w1 new site memory features
- Really fast javascript VM
- Special whiz-bang window-less web application mode
- Google gears built in!

Okay, so when you first hear about this the alarm bells really start to ring. OMG! What planet is google taking over next? The intentions aren't immediately clear ... but it looks like this is the project google has been incubating to bring gmail from beta to live. You know, that e-mail service google has open to hundreds of millions of people? Yeah, THAT beta service!

Everyone is talking about this like it's a shot across the bow of the big steamboat Redmond, but that smells like hooie. Microsoft has a large share of the browser market but that's by default rather than design ... and it's a shrinking share at that. This isn't about removing Microsoft from web browsers, it's about bringing quality TO web browsers. The more internet use there is, the better google does. The better the internet is, the more it will be used ... so google tries to improve the internet for Joe Average because Joe is worth money to google. So the timing of the release is timed around the IE8 privacy mode release ... but chrome wasn't written because google is scared.

Google's gears might have been included as an afterthought ... or perhaps this browser is to show off gears to the development world? Every developer loves a new browser right? Well, every web developer would have noted this news which has raged to just about every location Microsoft doesn't own. Even the mozilla foundation are talking about it. Kudos to google on a great Beta release announcement, everyone is watching in earnest :-)

Some of the features are pretty cool, and the intent smells fresh and wholesome, like google really does still care about making money the traditional google way. The most interesting twist of this new browser is that the code can be grabbed by you, me ... anybody. Which means that the other browsers already holding large market shares can just integrate google's changes immediately. So perhaps we'll see a faster Firefox and Safari ... the latter almost being certain and probably before chrome reaches final release stage. But google will still probably bring chrome to final release stage, at least until the other browsers catch up.

Anyone used an iPhone? One of the perplexing things on the iPhone was a YouTube 'application'. YouTube application? Isn't that a website? Well yes, just like google or gmail are websites ... all owned by google. Even Apple is turning google websites into applications, what will google do?

Well this is really the point isn't it? There's been lots of attempts (over the last ... 10 years or so) to turn desktop applications into browser applications. To blur the line between what is 'the internet' and what is your 'desktop'. Think active desktop, XAML, XUL, .NET, Silverlight, Dashboard, ... heck, even the windows (and linux) file explorers have this blurring built in. But what sort of application is flourishing? ... browser applications like gmail, youtube, myspace, facebook, google, blogger etc. etc. etc. Despite all of their limitations and nastiness, simple browser based applications have gone (and continue to go) a lot further than anything more clever or fully functional.

So google takes the simple approach. Make a set of tools that let developers do something that can already be done ... just make it easier. Then provide a platform to remove everything but the application from the window and vuala! Simple websites become web applications.

It doesn't take a visionary to see the benefits for google in all of this, but it's still a huge surprise. There were rumours floating around for a very long time but it didn't seem to make a lot of sense for google to get into desktop applications. I'm still hopeful that I'm not the only person here to miss the point.

Google isn't thinking about moving into desktop applications, google is thinking about extending web applications ... it was just necessary to create a platform to facilitate this. The chrome on the armor is really Android. Let's stop mincing words here, Android uses (or will use) chrome as the basis for it's browser. If people are going to get comfortable with a google browser, it's going to be while using their shiny new smartphone. It doesn't currently ring true that people will bother to load chrome on their PC's as a result, but just wait until your smart android shows you the power of gmail.