Understanding is the Essence of Intelligence

The upcoming release of Firefox, version 3.1 would be faster than Google Chrome:



Meanwhile Internet Explorer is still nowhere to be seen on these benchmarks as under 10 times slower than both Chrome and Firefox.

Today Google released its Open-Source web browser, Chrome (BETA) for Windows:



Chromium is the Open-Source Browser project powering Chrome.

The first thing we notice is that Chrome does not have a menu bar or a status bar at the bottom. It just has a Tab bar, a search/location bar and a favorites bar. This has two consequences: 1) it leaves more real-estate for applications and most-importantly 2) it looks very much like a desktop environment of its own, especially when the window is maximized. This is really slick!

Chrome shows the direction ahead. Google is aiming at providing a desktop platform for Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that does not really need a desktop environment under it. All this really needs is the kernel of an OS to access the underlying hardware.

So in effect, Google is not initiating a browser war but a desktop war for the web.

Many people think that Microsoft will crush it just like it crushed Netscape but the main difference between Google and Netscape back in 1995 is that Google has comfortable revenues outside the browser to survive forever and can even pay to get its browser preinstalled on PCs and MACs.

Google Office-like applications do not work very well today because of weaknesses and limitations of the current browsers, especially limitations from Internet Explorer that Microsoft is not willing to remove in order to prevent RIA to become a threat to its own Office suite. This is the reason why Google is coming out with Chrome. Google applications on Chrome will work as well as Microsoft-Office on PCs. While offline, our work will be saved on the local PC and will synchronize automatically when the PC comes online again.

The massive adoption of RIA by software vendors, with Google support, will render the underlying Operating System a commodity. The underlying OS will then become irrelevant and could become the free and Open-Source Linux, or at least its kernel.

The execution of this strategy does undermine Microsoft both for the OS and Office. The success of this strategy will require that Google executes well on it and that Microsoft ignores or denies it like IBM denied the power of the PC in 1985 letting the way for Microsoft to become the dominant predator.

Microsoft has no choice but to react by providing on/offline applications using either its proprietary RIA framework (aka Silverlight) or by improving standards support on Internet Explorer. Microsoft will have to provide better applications than Google to keep getting revenues from it. This will depend on Google applications feature set and quality. If Google, and other vendors', applications do get the minimum required feature set and reliability, Microsoft will have no other choice than getting better at generating revenues from advertising to compete against Google.

Mozilla and Firefox can continue to grow if Google Chrome plays with standard which is in Google best interests because Google gets revenues from advertising, not software. By allowing Firefox to continue to exist, and fund it as they do, Google will avoid Microsoft antitrust woes while getting more support from web application and Open Source developers.

At the very least and in the short term this will lead to better web browsers and probably more standard compliant web browsers and hopefully the wide adoption of SVG for which Chrome Beta already has (limited) support. IE should now be pressed to implement SVG.

Chrome is the most serious threat Microsoft has ever faced to its very business model. This is gonna be interesting :)