Sep 7th, 2008 |
There’s been a lot of discussion in the last week over Google’s entry into the browser wars. The real impact of Chrome is that Google rather than trying to simply displace IE, Firefox and Safari, Google wants to own the interface for Web 2.0.
Google’s vision is based on the browser as the operating system, with Web 2.0 enabling most users to spend all their time inside their browser. As a result, Google has designed Chrome from the ground-up as a multi-threaded browser capable of running multiple applications simultaneously with each window or tab in its own protected memory space. What underlies Chrome won’t matter - Mac, Windows, Linux, etc., rather Google hopes that delivering a superior browser will enable it to own the user interface for Web 2.0 based applications.
I believe it’s too early to tell whether or not Chrome will succeed, especially until plug-ins become as widely available as they are now for FireFox, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see major software and SaaS vendors begin to release versions of their applications or services optimized for Chrome.
I recently noticed that Chrome makes it very hard to use pop-up browsers on a site. The new popup moves it way to the bottom of the screen in a minimized format and requires a few clicks to maximize. Took me a while to even see that it had been acknowledged.
The pop-up has been abused by SPAM, but there are still sites and applications that require a secondary browser in order to support various tasks. There is no means to “allow popups for this site” as other browsers have done - unless the site is integrated within the Google Gears infrastructure.
I found this forced behavior interesting. Does this mean that their intention is to re-invent the way that sites build out and especially for any pop-up tasks?
I will say that I have made Chrome my default (for now) - more because of the curiosity factor, and because they really do focus your attention on the content and less on the frame in which it is delivered.