Will Google's new browser heat up the second browser wars?

Posted on 2nd September 2008 at 3:35 pm by Ian Macfarlane

Google has finally unveiled its new web browser, Google Chrome. Will this heat up the browser wars even further?

A web browser is one of the most important tools on our computers today. It’s our window to the web, the means by which we perform a vast amount of our computerised tasks, from shopping to discovering information, from communicating to playing and to just killing time. In effect, without web browsers, there is no web.

Microsoft came into a lot of criticism for “harming the web” after it killed its competitor Netscape and subsequently no longer felt the need to improve its own web browser, Internet Explorer. Finally, after years of stagnation, the upstart web browser Mozilla Firefox experienced a surge in popularity, and is widely seen as having forced Microsoft to resume work on its web browser again.

The second browser wars have begun, and there are numerous competitors vying for your attention. Microsoft improved somewhat with Internet Explorer 7, but the next version (the creatively named Internet Explorer 8) seems like a significant jump functionality (although lack of SVG support continues to be a sore point). The other major competitors are Mozilla, which recently released Firefox 3, Apple, whose Safari browser is extremely popular on the Mac and is used on the iPhone, and long-time industry survivor Opera.

And now, there is also Google. Today, Google announced that it is launching its own web browser called Google Chrome.

Google having its own web browser makes great sense – the company literally exists solely because the web exists. One of its biggest competitors, Microsoft, controls the majority of web browsers out there (despite big gains in the market share of Mozilla Firefox and other web browsers, Microsoft still has a commanding lead). Having your fate rest so heavily in the hands of any competitor, let alone one as notoriously aggressive as Microsoft, is enough to make any company uneasy.

In many ways, Google is the new Internet Explorer – previously, for a large number of the less tech-savvy population, the “big blue e” was the Internet. Now Google is associated with “The Internet” in a very similar way (you might be surprised by the number of people who think that the Google search box is where you type URLs!). Google is looking to take this one step further, and control both the client and the server.

Google is doing this via an interesting tactic – as with Android, its nascent mobile phone platform, Google Chrome is open source. This means that anyone can see the source code, or even copy it completely and rebrand it as their own.

Google has also taken a novel approach in promoting this new browser – it created a comic book, which explains the benefits and reasoning behind this new venture and distributed it to key bloggers. (You can see this comic book here although a warning – only seriously geeky people need apply!).

Some of the key features of Google Chrome are:

• Google Chrome is based on WebKit, the same backend as Apple’s Safari browser (which is also used on the iPhone). It is open source.
• Google is bundling Gears (formerly known as Google Gears) by default. One of the key benefits of Gears is that it allows you to create web applications that still function offline, something very useful to a company like Google.
• It includes several features which are slated to be included in the as-yet unreleased Internet Explorer 8, including a private browsing mode.
• It includes a way of seeing how many resources each website is using – this will change people from complaining about their web browser using too many resources to instead complaining about particular websites using too many resources, significantly increasing the pressure on webmasters to create speedy websites. Mozilla Corporation employee John Resig has called this a 100% killer browser feature.
• Google will use its massive infrastructure to provide additional features (for example, suggested websites) and to help with testing.

File under: google microsoft

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