2 September 2008 - 18:21Speculating on Chrome

Chrome, the browser developed by Google is about to be released. I get a pretty weird feeling from this, because Google was known to support Firefox, because it comes on such a short-notice and because I don’t see any benefits to Google, at least not immediately.

Firefox is a pretty decent browser, or more likely, a pretty decent browsing platform onto which you can install various plugins which will make you browsing experience better. Not too bad, even though I have a lot of problems with their address bar.

I think that what sets Google’s brower apart from the Firefox and IE, the browsers currently with the biggest market share, is the vast mass of data that Google has upon browser users and the way they will leverage this data to gain market share and the number of web-applications that it has in its portfolio. This browser will probably be integrated with Google’s other offerings such as GMail, Google Apps, etc… I think this sets them so far apart that the browser to come out of Google may not look like a browser anymore, but rather as an integration tool between your email (GMail), your RSS reader (Google Reader), your office documents (Google Documents), instant messaging (Google talk), etc… Who knows, maybe it will integrate even with Google Android ;-).

As I have said before, Google has put together a large amount of data that helps it describe the typical user that browses the web, and I think that this data will be leveraged in order to get ahead of Firefox because it Google may develop better ergonomics with of this data. Google will probably battle against Firefox for market share and this battle will be a battle between application designers (Firefox) and statistics on usage (Google). It will be interesting to see how it unfolds.

Later edit: I have been using Chrome for an hour or so and it feels more like a desktop than a browser. It manages to hide away, yet make available when needed, a lot of browser-specific functionalities. It feels like Firefox when run in full-screen mode, it gives you more space and manages to stay in the back-ground. A web-application should take advantage of all this space. The web is the new desktop…

My assumptions about Chrome’s design were largely wrong, from what I see Chrome is pretty much concerned with getting the browser out of the browsing experience by using a minimalist design rather than with implementing some funky ergonomics.
I think that its biggest hit is the extra space given to its user and I get the impression that  this extra space will make more of a difference for people WORKING thru the browser rather than simply consuming some passivly thru it, because this extra space makes you more productive. I don’t even see Chrome, yet with a few keystrokes I get any browser-specific functionality I need. I get the feeling that web-applications will need to be re-designed to work in Chrome and take advantage of Chrome’s extra space, for example Wordpress works atrociously in Chrome. 

Oh yeah, and the address bar is way better than Firefox’s. A few more tests and Firefox is history.

Later Edit: Firefox is history as far as I am concerned, I will be using Chrome.

Last thoughts on Chrome: Chrome is taking the browser out of web- browsing, it is almost invisible, when I am browsing I don’t see it at all, it has no edges and no menus, you only get the page that you are working on and its menus (this is why I said that web-applications may need to be re-designed in order to take advantage of the extra space that Chrome gives you, I am a bit confused when I am using Wordpress because where I now see Wordpress’s menus I was used to see Firefox’s menus). When I am toggling between pages I feel like I am toggling between 2 different applications.