We interrupt our series on “June/July 2008″ to bring you the following breaking news. Google has unveiled its latest product: Google Chrome. Google Chrome is Google’s browser, and it has hit the world like a storm.
Chrome is the latest in a torrent of products Google has unleashed (or at least revealed), which includes, amongst others, Google Gears and Android. These products have made Google a serious threat to its competitors; most notably Microsoft. Google has long been ill-content with only offering web services (Google Search, Orkut, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, the list just goes on…) and is moving unto people’s Desktops and hard drives. This is freaking many people out, who are seeing Google as the next Microsoft in disguise: a corporation which will eventually swallow up anything and everything until it can rule with an iron first. If haven’t paid much heed to these conspiracy theories, but the launch of Chrome is the first thing than unsettles me a bit. See, I love my Firefox and it will be hard for me to give it up. That said, I am terribly excited about trying out Chrome, due mostly to its intriguing design process.
The other thing is that Google is wielding a very powerful weapon extremely skilfully: open source software. Chrome has been made open source. Google knows how much to take and how much to give back. Of course, when you are already rolling in the money, it is easy to open up your ideas and code. But Google has been doing this from day one and in doing so has won the loyalty of many developers. It is even predicted that Google’s OpenSocial will be a serious threat Facebook (although I doubt this myself, as apps would have to become the dominant factor in social network websites, which I don’t think it will).
But back to web browsers. I am anxious to see what is going to happen in the “Browser Balance of Power”. The browser market has always been a two-horse town: first it was Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator1, and now it is Internet Explorer and Firefox. According to the latest statistics, Firefox has just under 50% of the market share, while a variety of versions of IE make up slightly more than 50%. The third and fourth most popular browsers (Opera and Safari), together make up 4.7% of the market share. At the beginning of the decade Microsoft dominated as Netscape was decaying, but more than 10 years ago Netscape dominated IE. Since the early 90s (when the browser wars started), the forces at war have not varied much. Now, Chrome is on the scene. It is made by Google, and if anyone knows the web, its Google. The design of Chrome, unlike with Firefox or modern version of IE, started with a clean slate: no legacy to cling on to (which would inevitably get in the way, according to the makers of Chrome). I believe Mozilla will manage to hold on to a fair share of the market2. And as long as Windows is the dominant operating system, there will always be IE users, no matter how universally appalling it is. So, will the tug-of-war be three-way? Or will Chrome deal a swift and decisive blow to its competitors? I think we’ll find out before long.
We shall now shortly return to the conclusion of our “June/July 2008″ series.
- Mozilla, who makes Firefox, arose from the ashes of Netscape, so you can think of the tug-of-war as pretty much the same it has always been. [↩]
- In June 2008, Firefox obtained a world record for the most downloads of a software product in 24 hours; that is not something people simply walk away from, I think. [↩]