What's Google Up To?

So you've probably heard of Chrome, Google's new web browser released this week.

Of course, anything Google does is going to get a lot of attention in the tech community and this was no exception. First there was the 'leaked' comic strip for geeks that illustrated — literally — the high points of the technology. Then there was the Walt Mossberg review (he got an advance copy). In addition, there's an article in Wired magazine (they were clued in a month in advance). It was all over every tech blog before it was even released.

Cool features? Google claims:

• Better reliability due to sandboxing web apps; each tab is a different OS process
• Extreme Javascript performance, 10x better than anything out there
• Innovative tab model
  
• A smarter address bar (with search integration)
  
• Better awareness of phishing sites
• Application shortcuts that make web apps look kinda like installed apps

And I think that last feature is really a clue as to why Google did this. This browser is made for web apps. Anyone that's had issues using Gmail, like pauses, slowdowns, and weird exits knows that much of this is due to the performance and stability of the browser and the behavior of other applications running in other tabs on the browser. By isolating the execution of the code in each tab and using the operating system's resiliency features that keep processes from interfering with each other, this browser will make people trust web applications more and give web apps legitimacy that previously was reserved for locally-installed programs.

Taken together, this added reliability and a radically faster Javascript engine are a game changer for web 2.0. See, Javascript is what makes web pages come alive, enabling programmers to dynamically modify text and images and create all kinds of graphical goodness like sliders, accordions, fades, and other cool effects. So the real goal is for Google to enable web apps (including Google's web apps, of course) to be first class citizens in the application universe.

Have they done it with Chrome? We'll see. Some concerns are that we may see Google pushing non-standard Javascript and CSS features out through Chrome, and using these to make their applications work better. This causes confusion for developers because they'll have another browser to target with its own unique quirks. Users may see apps that lose features or, in the worst case, don't operate at all on some browsers. However, it may drive innovation and get the other players to move faster in delivery of new features; Microsoft, for example, has been lagging in its support for CSS standards and Chrome may light a fire under them to get this rectified.

Google might have been agreeable to implementing these features in Mozilla's Firefox browser, but the Firefox folks probably would have resisted the massive changes because they would have broken many of the extensions that Mozilla-aligned developers have created over the last few years. So now we will see further fragmentation in the browser market and most probably a loss of share for Mozilla's Firefox.

Finally, it should be noted that Chrome only runs on Windows for now, but Google has said that versions for OS/X and Linux are in the works. Given the relative desktop market share, no one would argue Google's choice to release a Windows version first. What they really need to do is convince a large percentage of Windows users to use Chrome instead of IE, or force IE to support Chrome-like features in response to this threat. Either way, Google wins because it opens up a channel for more advanced web applications on the PC.