RickRussellTX

Google's Chrome Sounds Like 1970s Pressure Cooker

The business model for Google is "a vibrant, healthy Internet full of well-designed applications". They realize that, in order to sell advertising, they need to attract the maximum number of user eyes away from newspapers, television, etc. and put them in front of a computer screen. Maybe people sit in front of Google applications and services. Maybe not. Google will try to be the advertising broker in any case.

Also keep in mind that, as the tools to support interactive Web sites get better, Google will actually be able to sell services directly for green cash money. Public and private sector organizations are increasingly converting to hosted Web applications for e-mail, calendaring, CRM, ERP, etc. Google already has fingers in that space and they have made some key sales, and a fast, very stable Web browser can only make those applications more appealing.

I don't know if they will try to implement unique features in Chrome and use those as a selling point for the platform (Microsoft tried it with IE, and it was pretty roundly criticized). But even if they stick to "industry standards", if they do a better job than the competition -- better performance, fewer browser crashes, etc -- that may be enough to get folks to convert.

Look at it this way, you could have made *precisely* the same argument against Firefox, which was released in Nov. 2004. Only four short years later, it's at 20% market share (almost all at the expense of IE: www.computerworld.com/... ), a feat that was widely viewed impossible. Children and grandmothers are using it, because their computer-savvy friends are telling them that it's less vulnerable to malicious software.

Unlike some others, I don't see the Web browser bringing a natural end to standalone applications. Honestly, that's silly. Look at Google Docs, for example, and compare it to any 1990s version of MS Office, or even OpenOffice. The online offerings are short on features by a huge factor, and it will be years or even decades before browser-based offerings compete directly in that space. Ultimately, there will (and should be) healthy competition in at least two major classes of applications: standalone apps coded for each platform, and Web-based apps coded for the browser.

Google's Chrome Sounds Like 1970s Pressure Cooker

Let me break it down for you very simply.

On a Web site, there are two ways to generate content that is dynamic and interacts with the user:

(1) Every time the user does anything, submit a request back t the Web server and send new information back to the Web browser, or

(2) Run executable program code inside the Web browser itself that interacts with the user, sending updates back to the Web server only when necessary.

Google realizes that we are at a crossroads. The first crossroads was at the end of the dot-com bubble, when people started coding software designed to run on the Web browser's Javascript interpreter. That gave us rich applications like Gmail and Google Docs and Flickr.

Now we are at another crossroads. Web developers realize that if they want to code really fast, highly interactive applications (say, video editing), they must rely on a nonstandard technology, such as ActiveX (which is nothing more than executing a Windows program in the browser), Java or a plug-in like Flash. The degree to which each of these technologies can integrate with the Web browser is different -- ActiveX is tightly integrated with IE, but it's platform-locked to Windows. Java and Flash are great programming environments for various tasks, but they are essentially separate programs that run outside the browser, and do not really interact with the Web page at all. Java and Flash are also dependent on the whims of Sun and Adobe, respectively. And all three have serious implications for computer security, since they all allow the program code to run within the user's operating system. Java is pretty well locked down (and uses the same sandboxing model that Google is proposing), but Flash and ActiveX are security nightmares.

So, Google decided to develop their own solution designed to address the performance concerns of Javascript, the Web interactivity concerns of Flash and Java and the security concerns of ActiveX and Flash (and to a lesser extent, Java).

Will they pull it off? For many users, the fact that Google applications work better in Chrome may be enough to justify the switch. I spend a significant portion of my life in Gmail, Picasa and iGoogle.