Let the browser wars commence – Google on the Chrome offensive

When Google means business the Internet world shakes – some with excitement, some with fear. Such is the outcome of the surprise launch yesterday of Google Chrome – a new Internet browser (like Internet Explorer, FireFox and Safari before it).

The wires were / are buzzing with the news – and you can find out about it directly from Google here   (cut up all nice and simple for the short attention spanned YouTube generation) and here (long winded in-depth rationale behind the project delivered in a quirky comic book stylee – probably more for the techy than the general user - worth a peek though, until you get bored).

You’ll read a lot about it over the coming days and probably months and years, but I thought I’d share the first take of my Developer business partner in crime when I asked for his opinion on the latest Google Beta fuss.  This is, of course, just a very initial personal opinion and doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinion of this blog, it’s contributors or businesses aligned to those contributors (read: please don’t take away my gmail account Mr Google sir or revoke my Office user license Mr Microsoft ;) – but I found this a good summary. Over to you Tony:

It's good, it's damn fast. Some benchmarks are showing that the javascript handling is 56 times faster than Internet Explorer, and over 10 times faster than FireFox. Makes it great for javascript heavy websites (think Facebook, Google Maps, etc)

The interface is snazzy, I quite like the minimalism involved. The launch came as a complete surprise - Google had managed to keep the development secret for two years, and actually launched the browser only a couple days after the first real leaks (the comic book) - so minimal marketing hype.

The dev communities are overwhelmed in general, all my tech sites are swamped in Chrome articles and links, and my Web Standard Group list has had tons of comments flying through it.

Amusingly, a crash report (and possible exploit) was released from the SecuriTeam guys in the first day - which again shows that the BIG guys are looking at it closely too.

Bit of a storm hitting the interwebs at the moment - very exciting though :-D

There are lots of privacy concerns though - the EULA essentially states that anything you do inside the Chrome browser could potentially become Google's property, which has raised its own little conspiracy storm of
its own :-D

Anything that takes a percentage from Microsoft is a win though, even if they take some Firefox users with them! Google is certainly got the clout to challenge them though, now that they've wedged themselves in the non-techy communities as a brand.

Good stuff! Bring on the browser wars!

Oh - it's only available for Windows at the moment, which is a bit
frustrating :-D

So there you have it. A techie’s take on what is probably the biggest techie news this year (This century? – discuss).

Interested in how other people are finding it (come on – some of you have gotta have downloaded it already and had a lunchtime play). It of course makes cross browser compatibility all the more longwinded to verify for those of us building and launching sites, but as Google always maintain – it’s all about making the web yet more accessible, faster and better (if only so you can click on more of the ads they’re serving you), so even with the fall out that will of course happen (just as the lovely FireFox was getting a foothold can they really go head to head with a opensourced Google beta browser?) this is something that will definitely shape the internet user experience significantly!

What do you think?

Comments

[Mike McClelland]

Hi Alex,

Yes the privacy issue might be a real issue. Jemima Kiss covered it nicely here: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/09/googles_chrome_loses_its_shine.html

And yes, for those of us in the web development world it means more testing! However, our early indications are it renders pretty much like Firefox.

Mike

[Tony]

Thankfully they're using the WebKit rendering engine, which is the same one used by Safari, so any actual rendering issues should be covered by our normal Safari testing.

Unfortunately, Chrome uses a slightly older version than Safari - therefore now fixing bugs that Safari have already tackled.

The only part we should need to worry about is any clever uses of Javascript, since Chrome has its own brand new engine for that.

[Ben]

I downloaded it, looked at my first site on it, and yep - cross-browser testing is required as I'm looking at my third repeated top nav on the site I'm viewing. And it's not one we built, by the way.

But I too got all excited about this on the train this morning - wanting to share my interest, then realising that the rest of the carriage probably couldn't care less.

But I shall perservere - love the simplicity, and as a dedicated follower of Firefox, it will need to do a good job to move me away, but am enjoying the new toy. Privacy bit sounds a bit intimidating, but heyho.

[Ben]

Ignore that first comment in my last post - I just looked at the site in IE7, IE6 and Firefox - it looks the same in all - so it was the design.

Oh dear. That's not good.

[Alex Hens]

what's the site - what's the site?

[Matt]

Had a go with it yesterday evening and loved it. Google really are dismantling Microsoft piece by piece at the moment...

[Luke Collier]

Hi all

I might be wrong but I thought that Google funded firefox to the tune of 10s of millions of dollars a year. If this stops what does that do to firefox?

My other comment would be that firefox has a release coming out very soon which is apparently as fast if not faster than Chrome.

Having just really settled into Firefox I am loathed to move from it now.....damn.

Luke

[Tony]

I don't think many of us will be moving away from Firefox, at least until Chrome supports 3rd party plugins that many of us have come to rely on.

Google represents about 80% of Mozilla's total revenue from funding, so yes, they're heavily reliant on Google. Google will carry on funding Mozilla until 2011, so nobody's panicking quite yet!