Order of the Bath

Well, I got it up and running and fine it looks too. A bit dodgy around the edges but it is a Google Beta (what the rest of the world calls an Alpha release) and still a development project so we can’t criticise.

What I actually want to say here is much deeper. It must be noted that Google are not designing a new browser. The market is already full of those IE? (pick a number from 5 to 8), Firefox, Safari, Opera… Chrome certainly should be a good browser and proposes some interesting features. But, no, what Google is promoting here is a platform; a base on which they can build their web applications that they have developed over the years and will be continuing in the future—Search, gMail, Calendar, and more. So far they have been dependent on the browsers and those, without exception, have had weaknesses in areas that Google needs to succeed.

For example, we know that occasionally any browser will lock up. The developers try hard to fix them but they still do it. Google are in the business of supplying all your needs via web applications so can’t afford for the browser to crash. They are not saying that Chrome will be immune from this problem but that a lock caused by one site will not crash out the whole browser, just that window.

When you look at it this way, Google are putting themselves right into competition with system suppliers like Microsoft and Apple, but Google are doing it via the web where the others do it on the hardware. What Chrome does is bring the interface under their control. This will allow kiosk like devices (thin clients) where, as far as the user is aware, the operating system is the browser. All services are obtained remotely; the closest we have got to network computing since the idea was mooted.

This entry was posted on 4 Sep 2008 at 12:31 by Rick and is filed under Browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.