Will Google Chrome Outshine IE8

John Furrier was way out in front of the Google Chrome story. What's Chrome you ask? Google will announce tomorrow they are coming out with a new browser called "Chrome". The feature list looks a lot like IE7 and IE8 with a sprinkling of Firefox. And the kicker, supposedly it will be 100% open source.

This is HUGE! And the strategy is only thinly veiled. Google is planning an end-around on the OS market. Between Google Apps, Gears and new Chrome they are attempting to make the OS irrelevant. Much the way VMWare ESXi, or Microsoft Server Core, boots to a minimal operation set as a foundation Google can bootstrap through linux. The vision is booting to a foundation OS that launches Chrome as a gateway to the Google ecosystem and takes Microsoft out of the game.

It's a bold strategy and I'm not sure it's realistic in the enterprise market but it could change the game for the larger (in raw numbers) consumer market. Emerging markets like China and India are huge opportunities. It's the 80s land grab all over again. Except this time, instead of Microsoft and Apple it's Microsoft and Google. Microsoft annihilated Apple in the 80s and 90s but Google may prove a more resilient competitor this time around. However, Google's strategy begs for antitrust inspection. The analysis I've seen is that they hope to avoid this by keeping the project open source and furthering the ecosystem through open contribution. I don't know enough about antitrust law to form an opinion but it seems a bit flimsy.

Phillip Lenssen posted the first story I've seen on the topic and it's full of detail. More than one might expect from an as-yet-unannounced product. I think he's been tracking this one for awhile. He also says to keep an eye out at http://www.google.com/chrome. I'd imagine this will end up at http://chrome.google.com sooner or later. Phillip pulled out the feature list in detail on his blog (below)

• Google Chrome is Google’s open source browser project. As rumored before under the name of “Google Browser”, this will be based on the existing rendering engine Webkit. Furthermore, it will include Google’s Gears project.
• The browser will include a JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8, built from scratch by a team in Denmark, and open-sourced as well so other browsers could include it. One aim of V8 was to speed up JavaScript performance in the browser, as it’s such an important component on the web today. Google also say they’re using a “multi-process design” which they say means “a bit more memory up front” but over time also “less memory bloat.” When web pages or plug-ins do use a lot of memory, you can spot them in Chrome’s task manager, “placing blame where blame belongs.”
• Google Chrome will use special tabs. Instead of traditional tabs like those seen in Firefox, Chrome puts the tab buttons on the upper side of the window, not below the address bar.

• The browser has an address bar with auto-completion features. Called ’omnibox’, Google says it offers search suggestions, top pages you’ve visited, pages you didn’t visit but which are popular amd more. The omnibox (“omni” is a prefix meaning “all”, as in “omniscient” – “all-knowing”) also lets you enter e.g. “digital camera” if the title of the page you visited was “Canon Digital Camera”. Additionally, the omnibox lets you search a website of which it captured the search box; you need to type the site’s name into the address bar, like “amazon”, and then hit the tab key and enter your search keywords.
• As a default homepage Chrome presents you with a kind of “speed dial” feature, similar to the one of Opera. On that page you will see your most visited webpages as 9 screenshot thumbnails. To the side, you will also see a couple of your recent searches and your recently bookmarked pages, as well as recently closed tabs.

• Chrome has a privacy mode; Google says you can create an “incognito” window “and nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged on your computer.” The latest version of Internet Explorer calls this InPrivate. Google’s use-case for when you might want to use the “incognito” feature is e.g. to keep a surprise gift a secret. As far as Microsoft’s InPrivate mode is concerned, people also speculated it was a “porn mode.”
• Web apps can be launched in their own browser window without address bar and toolbar. Mozilla has a project called Prism that aims to do similar (though doing so may train users into accepting non-URL windows as safe or into ignoring the URL, which could increase the effectiveness of phishing attacks).
• To fight malware and phishing attempts, Chrome is constantly downloading lists of harmful sites. Google also promises that whatever runs in a tab is sandboxed so that it won’t affect your machine and can be safely closed. Plugins the user installed may escape this security model, Google admits.