Chrome is Google’s own browser project. When I first heard that Google were doing this, my own reaction, and that of my colleagues, was “What the…?”. The last thing the web development industry needs is another browser to deal with. I had a conversation with a fellow web developer friend not long ago about how we were pretty much heading back to the situation of the late 90’s where the individual vendors starting going so far away from the agreed W3C standards, that as a web developer you had a make a choice of which browsers you could realistically support. Back then, getting a site to work in all the different browsers was incredibly time consuming and most clients weren’t prepared to pay the extra cost involved.
Now, I think I counted by the end of the year we would have 10 major browsers, that we would realistically have to support in all our web applications and site. That is before you start looking at mobile browsers, and the smaller guys who are still hanging around, like Opera in the Nintendo Wii and a few other devices.
Then you’ve got Apple’s WebKit project going completely away from even the next planned version of HTML/CSS standards, developing powerful, advanced features that will only work in WebKit. This browser is literally changing every day, they do a nightly build with new code. Incidentally, Google are using WebKit for the base of their browser.
That said, this article on TechCrunch puts the Google strategy in perspective. They already have their Gears technology that allows web applications to run whilst disconnected from the Internet, they have an alternative to the Microsoft Office suite, they are partnered with Salesforce.com for CRM and business applications, Instant Messenger, email, wikis, blogs, social networks…etc, etc. If they can wrap all of this into a Google browser that can also run offline, why would you need an operating system really? You don’t need lots of hardware like high capacity hard drives, you can store everything in the Google “cloud” and retrieve what you want, when you need it.
It is interesting and could well be the plan that Google had all along. At times it had been difficult to understand how they would bring all these disparate applications and services together, but obviously their own browser would do just that. What I find even more interesting is I have just downloaded an application called GMDesk, which is an Adobe AIR application (not developed by Google) that allows you run all your main Google applications in a single interface.
There is obviously the demand for the concept, and I have to say I’m finding it really useful. I’ll continue watching the progress of Chrome with interest.
Technorati Tags: chrome, google, gmdesk, webkit
