To bet–or not to bet–on Chrome

An interesting article in Computerworld sings the praises

of Chrome, Google’s new entrant into the browser wars, but says it’s far too early to bet the enterprise on the nascent browser. While many of its arguments hit home, most notably the tough time some enterprises that have standardized on Microsoft IE and its Active X controls will have in switching, there are many other enterprise examples where Chrome far outshines any other browsers out there. So yes, while it may be too early to make the shift, it’s not too early to start gauging the business benefits of the change.

In the article, Preston Galla ticks off all of Chrome’s attractive enterprise features–its powerful V8 JVM for speeding JavaScript applications, its sandboxed tabs that prevent crashes in one tab from affecting applications running in another, and its integration of Gears, for enabling online/offline capabilities (for more, see Thomas A. Powell’s test here). But Galla says that all this still shouldn’t make enterprises abandon Microsoft Office and Exchange for Google Docs and Gmail. Well, that may be so, but that’s not the alternative most enterprises are considering. Where Chrome shines, especially in comparison with IE, is in handling enterprise Web applications such as those built on emerging services-oriented architectures (SOA). Because it’s built from the ground up to work with the Web, Chrome can help make current–and future–SOA applications work far more efficiently.

As Preston Bannister writes in his blog arguing for Chrome in the enterprise, Chrome is an excellent browser for enterprise intranet applications. He says:

Lots of companies have internally-used applications. Lots of developer-hours went into those applications, and some of those applications end up being mission critical. The average level of programming talent that went into creating those applications is often less than first rate, and so they tend to be somewhat inefficient, and somewhat unreliable.

Google Chrome is probably the best platform for those not-entirely-performant and not-entirely-reliable internally developed applications. The fast Javascript engine means less efficient applications will run better on Chrome, and isolation of Javascript engines within means less-reliable applications will cause less trouble when run within Chrome.

So Chrome, rather than being a risky roll of the dice for some organizations, may actually be a smart bet for legacy Web apps. In any event, it’s time to at least begin examining the odds.