Frameworks
Great Googly Moogly
Excited about Chrome; but even more excited about Microsoft's response.
We had just finished editing a short news article on market-share trends among competing Web browsers when Google suddenly released a Web browser of its own to compete with Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and niche browsers like Opera and Safari.
As RDN Executive Editor Jeffrey Schwartz reports, Google Chrome arrives with a lot of intriguing ideas and big-picture potential that should, frankly, scare the pants off of executives at Microsoft.
On one hand, Google Chrome could be dismissed as just another me-too Web browser. After all, some of the coolest ideas implemented in Chrome are already in play in Firefox, IE8 and elsewhere. The sandboxing of tabbed pages to prevent one bad page from hauling down the entire browser, for example, is already implemented by rival browsers. And the privacy-enabling Incognito feature can be found in IE8 in the form of InPrivate.
But Chrome offers something that no other browser can -- Google's white-hot Web mojo.
Forgive me while I savor a moment of déjvu. Remember back in the mid-1990s when Netscape had smashed Microsoft's nascent online strategy? Everyone at the time was wondering what might be next if Netscape could continue to innovate. The logical end game was for Netscape's browser to emerge as an honest-to-goodness operating system.
Of course, we all know what happens to companies that pose an existential threat to Microsoft. And make no mistake, cooking up a long-term strategy that seeks to supplant Windows is the very definition of an existential threat.
So while I'm excited about Google's Chrome browser, I'm even more excited to see what Microsoft's response will be to Chrome. We can expect a continued surge of innovation with IE -- a welcome prospect given Redmond's unconscionable decision to just drop IE development after it pretty much turfed Netscape in 1998. But more importantly, we can expect platform-wide innovation.
Google may not own the desktops or servers or sundry other devices connected to the Internet, but it's done a phenomenal job of capturing the hearts and minds of the people who use those machines. From the search engine that started it all to Google Gears, Google Apps and Android, the widening circle of Google's influence is impossible to ignore.
This, already, is a trick that Netscape never managed to pull off. And it seems clear that, unlike Netscape a decade ago, Google isn't going to just fade away as a viable competitive threat.
Is your Web dev shop looking to support Google Chrome? E-mail me at
mdesmond@reddevnews.com
and let me know what you think of Google's browser push.
About the Author
Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.