Google Chrome

Of course the big news yesterday was the (one day premature) announcement of Google Chrome, Google’s much rumored browser. I am looking forward to trying it out today. Based on the comic strip Google used to describe it, Chrome has some nice innovations in it. First and foremost are the use of processes to isolate tabs and significant improvements to Javascript execution. The fact that Google released Chrome as open source is positive, but I wonder whether it would not have been healthier if this innovation had come through the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox. Would be interesting to know if there was any attempt by Google to get Mozilla to incorporate these things that were rebuffed. That would shed some light on Google’s motives in releasing their own. The most likely sticking point for Google could be around Gears, which is crucial for making the Browser a real application execution environment with offline capabilities. While Gears itself is opensource, I believe that Google controls the API and its evolution. This has the biggest potential impact on other companies (and not just Microsoft) that deliver web apps. Google’s willingness to have the Gears API be subject to some kind of community or standards process will be fairly important.