A new superpower just entered the long-simmering browser war: today, after years of secret work, Google, the world's most popular search engine, will unveil its own browser, called Chrome.

The software, which is in beta, will be distributed for free to PC users in more than 100 countries via Google's blog. (Mac and Linux versions are in the works.) Word of the impending launch accidentally leaked on Monday, when Google mistakenly sent a comic-book-style announcement detailing Chrome to a blog.

"On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple," Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director, wrote on the official Google blog on Monday afternoon. "To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the Web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go."

Chrome looks like a "best of" browser, incorporating — and in some cases, improving upon — a few of the most popular features of its competitors. Like Firefox's "awesome bar," Chrome's search blank keeps track of keywords in a user's previous visit, allowing one to type in, say, "baseball" and pull up any Web pages he'd visited recently that pertain to that sport. Also like Firefox, Chrome supports tabs as a way to open and keep track of multiple windows, though Chrome puts the tabs above the search blank rather than below it. There's also a privacy function — which bloggers have dubbed the "porn mode" — that allows users to privately visit sites without Google or their History files recording the visits.

That feature, by the way, is also included in Microsoft's newest version of its popular browser, IE 8, which went into its second beta release last week.

With a 72% share of the browser market, Microsoft is the real target here. Far from sinking into irrelevance, desktop computer browsers have continued to evolve and become even more integral to how we use the Web. Whoever controls that experience can leverage it to the detriment of website owners — and in ways that must keep the Google guys up at night. For instance, IE 8 makes it far easier to find something without going through a Google search. When you search within IE 8, you're presented with a number of buttons, such as Search Yahoo! or Search Wikipedia.

"It shouldn't be a big surprise to anyone that Google's doing this," said John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, the company behind Firefox, the world's second most popular browser. Noting the aggressive direction that Microsoft is taking, he added, "I think Google has some nervousness around issues of control and ownership."

Over the long term, Firefox, which recently released its 3.0 version — downloaded more than 8 million times, a record — could be collateral damage in the browser wars. Google has long been a patron of its open-source browser, and pays a kind of "click back" to Mozilla for directing its 200 million users to Google. In 2006, the last time Mozilla released its numbers on the subject, Google had paid the company $65 million. "It's north of that now," Lilly said. He noted that Google recently extended its relationship with Mozilla until 2011, which gives it plenty of time to maneuver. Likewise, as powerful as Google is in the search world, it only has, by some measures, around 135 million monthly users — a far smaller population than Firefox's users.

Indeed, getting people to actually download software, even free software, is a lousy business and takes lots of experience. Lilly, who is usually a calm fellow, appeared to be especially unperturbed by Google's encroachment into Firefox's terrain. "The most surprising thing about Google's announcement today was this — everyone has been talking about the mobile future," he said. "But desktop browsing is the really contested field right now."

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1837914,00.html

New! Download Chrome (BETA) - the new browser from Google

Playing with Google Chrome – Too Simplistic or Perfectly Minimalist?

Svetlana Gladkova,

09/02/2008, 19 hours 29 minutes ago

As I believe everyone has heard already, Google has introduced a browser of its own - named Chrome. Yesterday the blogosphere was abuzz about the comic book Google distributed to share its vision for a web browser (by the way, I have not seen such long threads on Techmeme for a long time now).

Basically Google Chrome is an open-source browser developed by Google using existing WebKit rendering engine (the one used in Aple’s Safari browser) and its own Google Gears technology for offline use of supported web applications. The browser developed by Google is described by the company as something of a new generation of browser - the one working mainly with rich interactive applications instead of simple text pages of the past. The browser has launched as a Windows-only beta version today with versions for Mac and Linux claimed to be in the works.

I spent all day yesterday constantly refreshing Google Chrome site hoping to be able to play with it before publishing my opinion about the browser. Unfortunately finally I fell asleep in hope to see it available in the morning. Now that the browser is finally available for download (it must have been well after midnight in all the time zones of Russia so the promise we would see Chrome on Tuesday was not particularly true) I am able to play with Chrome and report my impressions here.

First of all, I was very surprised to see that Chrome is launched with a localized Russian version from the very beginning (and lots of other languages supported for the browser’s interface). But at the same time I was very unpleasantly surprised that right after I clicked the installation link they somehow decided I actually wanted to get the Russian-language version. I have stated quite a number of times that Google is far from perfect in their localization efforts and while I appreciate they think about Russian users and want to offer us a Russian-language version, why don’t they offer us some choice in addition? Besides, as I quickly found out, Google Chrome localization is far from perfect also.

Then there was another pleasant surprise: right during the installation process Chrome offered to import all my bookmarks from Firefox - something Firefox users will be sure to appreciate. But unfortunately import simply did not work for me at all: Chrome warned me that I had to close Firefox first for import to happen - I did as advised and clicked the “next” button - but no matter how many times I clicked that button no import happened so I had to cancel it finally.

Now that I had Chrome up and running, I tried to fine-tune it for it to meet my minimum expectations for language and bookmarks. As soon as I figured out where to find the settings in the browser (I have to admit, it is quite a strange feeling for me not to have any menu at all) I changed the language settings and it was a success finally - only tool restarting the browser.

Next step was to finally have my bookmarks imported. This time it worked perfectly fine and I had everything imported from Firefox (including saved passwords and browsing history - since both are incredibly important for the majority of users, I think this functionality must determine probability of people actually migrating). Thank you, my first two disappointments are now addressed and I can actually work, even though it is still hard to grasp for me why the bookmarks from Firefox should be accessible only from a separate folder:

Now that I felt I was finally settled, I could finally take a look at the browser itself. My first observation is that Chrome is very different from what I am accustomed to on Firefox - simplistic to the extent I’ve never seen anywhere else. I’m not quite sure if this is “too simplistic” or “simplistic enough” for me as of yet but time will tell if I will be able to get accustomed to the new browsing mode without any distractions from the pages I browse at all.

But I am sure that many new users will be shocked by seeing nothing but the page you are browsing in the browser - and it will be up to Google to make people realize that they can enjoy more space for actual content, not less features to use the content.

The only thing I wanted to check with Chrome was how it will perform with a few tabs I keep open constantly in Firefox - so since I had my bookmarks in I could give it a try. So I opened: Profy, Profy in admin view, Profy stats, Techmeme, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs, FriendFeed, Twitter and a few other pages to create certain load on the browser.

My main impression is that Chrome works pretty fast - both in opening and updating pages and performing various standard functions I normally do on the pages. I have not seen any problems with accessing any of the pages I usually visit - and everything was processed with an amazing speed. The only victim was Profy’s traffic stats page since it uses JAVA to operate - and Chrome does not seem to have a plug-in required to display JAVA properly:

One interesting surprise for me was that the “recent bookmarks” section on the homepage actually showed all the bookmarks on Digg and StumbleUpon, not only those bookmarks added to the browser itself. Honestly, I’d prefer to have those separate simply because while I can bookmark dozens of sites per day on social bookmarking sites, I only add those I need to actually visit again and again to my browser bookmarks - and giving them more prominence could be a good idea, especially given the need to make an extra click to access my bookmarks imported from Firefox.

Another small disappointment was not with Chrome itself but with Window’s Task Manager instead: since Chrome takes pride in handling every single tab opened as a separate process, I quickly had a long list of Chrome process so it took some time to find another process (for my IM client Miranda) that I wanted to close.

In general I believe we will have many positive reviews of Google Chrome because it really looks like an interesting and innovative approach to browsing the web. But my opinion is that in its current state it looks like intended mostly for early adopters instead of an average internet user. And while early adopters can hardly be considered as a market, even they will hardly stick unless we start to get all those plug-ins and add-ons we already use in Firefox. But chances are if Google acts fast in both developing crucial plug-ins (like that for JAVA) and encouraging third-party developers to create versions of their browser plug-ins for Chrome, at least early adopters will stick and get accustomed to the new minimalist browser - hopefully followed by more mainstream population (admittedly with help of Chrome pushed at all visitors of Google home page).

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to profy RSS feed!

http://profy.com/2008/09/02/google-chrome-too-simplistic-or-perfectly-minimalist/?referer=sphere_related_content

Five reasons Chrome will take over the world

By Nick Heath, silicon.com, News.com
Posted on ZDNet News: Sep 03, 2008 8:14:06 AM

After all the polished promises of a streamlined new way to tame the web, the blogosphere was ready to predict Chrome would inspire everything from the end of Firefox to the demise of Microsoft itself.

silicon.com spoke to industry experts and Google's new rivals to find out why Chrome matters and whether the browser reality can deliver on the hype.

Bye bye Microsoft
Chrome carries shades of an OS in a browser's clothing and Google's latest encroachment on Redmond's turf must have a few Microsoft execs sweating.

The way Chrome will allow users to run and manage applications without an OS' intervention could mean the beginning of the end for the days of Vista's bloatware.

David Mitchell, VP for IT research at analysts Ovum, said: "What you are seeing is the language of the browser coming very close to that of the operating system, with services provided at the browser level rather than the OS level.

"If some of the OS functionality is within the browser then there will be a demand for a more anorexic OS running underneath.

"It is a big step towards telling people like Microsoft that they are not so popular after all."

Google-branded life
Chrome will provide a central point for the company's panoply of services and applications, offering a hub to consolidate everything from Google Maps and Docs to Gmail and Shopping.

Google already has millions of users on Google Apps - applications from calendaring to video, all hosted on its cloud computing infrastructure, and a Google branded browser is an obvious way to persuade even more users to start experimenting with the company's other web-based offerings.

Nate Elliott, research director at analysts Jupiter Research, said: "This is not a new idea, they have had the Google toolbar for four to five years with the idea of driving users towards their products and services. Now you will have what is a far bigger and better version of the toolbar to drive users towards those services."

Consumer love-in
Google has proved to be a master of wooing consumers, charming new users by offering free versions of traditionally paid-for services.

With 70 per cent of the world's web searches going through Google's search engine, the company has built up a brand awareness so strong that the verb 'to Google' is already part of the lexicon. It's this popularity that could give Chrome a headstart and quickly turn it into a contender.

Google's history of consumer-pleasing and unfussy design--think of its sparse, ad-free homepage--could serve Chrome well. Jupiter Research's Elliott said: "Google products are typically very easy to use and very consumer friendly.

"They focus extremely heavily on this relationship and everything that they do keeps consumers in mind."

Tor Odland, head of communications for rival browser Opera, said: "They have a massive footprint and Google will probably be more successful than another company trying this because of that."

No more lock-ups
It might sound trivial but the ability to kill individual tabs within Chrome could spell the end of the hair-tearing frustration of a single rogue web page bringing the entire browser crashing down.

Not only that but the way the browser will run every tab in an isolated "sandbox" can help provide better protection from malicious sites.

Ovum's Mitchell said: "Each tab is attached to a separate process and can be managed separately.

"It is a bit like what Window NT offered in terms of stability. Most of the current generation of browsers would crash if there was a badly behaved tab but Chrome can quit the tab and it will still work."

Microsoft too is working on the ability to kill a tab and still save the browser, with a similar feature showing up in IE8 beta 2.

If you can't beat them
Google is taking the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach with Chrome, shamelessly borrowing features from its would-be competitors.

These include the open source approach of Firefox; Opera's speed dial function, where a homepage presents thumbnails of your most visited sites; an "incognito" window for private browsing where nothing is recorded, similar to Safari and the forthcoming IE8; and an address bar with auto-completion features.

Opera's Odland said: "It is very much a market where everybody knows what everybody else is doing and you can expect Google to take innovations such as the speed dial homepage and tabs on top from Opera and vice versa."

Not convinced by Chrome? Read five reasons why it may crash and burn here...

http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-219392.html?referer=sphere_related_content

September 2nd, 2008

Google Chrome is complementary to Firefox

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:45 am

The media is going to be all over the Google Chrome story today, painting it as a threat to or rejection of Firefox.

It’s not.

While it’s true Google pulled its developers off Firefox in 2006, the resulting code is open source.

Google felt it had to go to a clean sheet of paper in order to deal with key problems and take advantage of its own infrastructure in development.

As the now famous comic book describes it, Chrome is aimed at solving key problems with current browser design — single-threading, inefficient rendering engines, incomplete garbage collection — that slow you down once you put up a bunch of tabs.

I do it all the time with Firefox. Working on a story like this one I may have a dozen or more tabs open, building an array of sources I can then cut-and-paste as links in a story.

This can easily crash Firefox. If one tab has corrupt code the whole browser is hung-up. And it slows Firefox down, because a tab’s memory isn’t entirely cleared out when you close it.

Chrome is based on open source technologies like Webkit and Javascript, so it’s not a “corporate capture” of the Internet. It can’t be. If Mozilla likes aspects of it, Mozilla can adapt them. The comic explicitly endorses Mozilla’s capture of the V8 Javascript engine, for instance.

In the end this isn’t about Microsoft or Mozilla or Google at all, but the Web and Web developers. Chrome is designed for a more complex development environment, and a more sophisticated user base.

Over the last few years it has become obvious that, given Google’s size, it would “take over” any project it contributed to. The Chrome project is an explicit acknowledgement of that reality.

But it’s not a threat to open source. It is open source. I am really looking forward to trying Chrome, because if it fulfills all its promises it’s going to be a very good thing.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2848

September 3rd, 2008

Mozilla CEO: No worries about Google Chrome

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 5:55 am

Mozilla CEO John Lilly said he has no worries about Google jumping into the open source browser market.

In a blog posted on September 1 before the beta release of Google’s Chrome yesterday, Lilly noted that Mozilla’s Firefox has plenty of competition and reminded the public that the foundation’s primary motive is to keep the web open.

“As much as anything else, it’ll mean there’s another interesting browser that users can choose. With IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc — there’s been competition for a while now, and this increases that. So it means that more than ever, we need to build software that people care about and love. Firefox is good now, and will keep on getting better,” Lilly wrote. “Competition often results in innovation of one sort or another — in the browser you can see that this is true in spades this year, with huge Javascript performance increases, security process advances, and user interface breakthroughs. I’d expect that to continue now that Google has thrown their hat in the ring.”

Lilly also said the two organizations will continue to cooperate and hinted that Mozilla will remain independent.

“It should come as no real surprise that Google has done something here — their business is the web, and they’ve got clear opinions on how things should be, and smart people thinking about how to make things better. Chrome will be a browser optimized for the things that they see as important, and it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves,” he wrote.

Google announced the beta release of Chrome as Mozilla prepares to freeze the beta 1 code for Firefox 3.1 on September 30 and as Microsoft IE8 beta slips into the marketplace.

Lilly’s blog continued:

“Mozilla and Google have always been different organizations, with different missions, reasons for existing, and ways of doing things. I think both organizations have done much over the last few years to improve and open the Web, and we’ve had very good collaborations that include the technical, product, and financial. On the technical side of things, we’ve collaborated most recently on Breakpad, the system we use for crash reports — stuff like that will continue. On the product front, we’ve worked with them to implement best-in-class anti-phishing and anti-malware that we’ve built into Firefox, and looks like they’re building into Chrome. On the financial front, as has been reported lately, we’ve just renewed our economic arrangement with them through November 2011, which means a lot for our ability to continue to invest in Firefox and in new things like mobile and services.

“So all those aligned efforts should continue,” he insisted. “And similarly, the parts where we’re different, with different missions, will continue to be separate. Mozilla’s mission is to keep the Web open and participatory — so, uniquely in this market, we’re a public-benefit, non-profit group (Mozilla Corporation is wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation) with no other agenda or profit motive at all. We’ll continue to be that way, we’ll continue to develop our products & technology in an open, community-based, collaborative way.”

Mozilla’s Firefox will continue to be competitive, he said.

“With that backdrop, it’ll be interesting to see what happens over the coming months and years,” Lilly said.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2853

Google Browser "Chrome" Takes Battle With Microsoft To New Level

***UPDATE***

GOOGLE CHROME BROWSER DOWNLOAD IS NOW LIVE for PC users.

***

Google accidentally leaked -- in the form of an explanatory electronic comic book -- its own announcement of a new Google Web browser -- just a little earlier than it meant to.

The comic book offers insight into the latest strike by Google against Microsoft, saying that current Web browsers are of an old mindset, and that Web applications like browser-based email (like Hotmail, Yahoo mail or, sure, why not, Gmail) called for a browser started from scratch.

The browser will only be available to PC users on Windows Vista or XP initially, though Google is working on Mac and Linux versions, according to Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google.

The Google browser -- "Chrome" -- is clear in its purpose for users, but clearer in its purpose for the company.

The Google browser takes direct aim at Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer, which is by far the most widely used program for viewing Internet sites. The two companies already compete in Internet search engines, where Google holds a wide lead. Google has also developed Web-based alternatives to Microsoft's popular Word, Excel and PowerPoint programs.

While many people pay little attention to which browser they use, the choice makes a big difference to software companies. They can use the precious screen real estate to promote their own Web services. Moreover, they can tailor their browsers to ensure compatibility with their other products.

The Google Chrome download site appears to have existed briefly -- according to Google's own search cache for "Google Chrome download" -- but currently yields no actual download site. Instead, there's a lot of chatter about the new Google browser and even a Google Chrome screenshot leak or two.

The new browser apparently clarifies one of Google's many acquisitions, a company called GreenBorder:

Google Chrome's debut answers a 16-month mystery: Why did Google buy GreenBorder Technologies? I looked at GreenBorder in 2006 and thought it was a great product. Essentially, GreenBorder used some virtual machine technology to isolate programs from the operating system, but still allowed them to talk with the OS in a controlled way. The most useful job for GreenBorder was to "sandbox" a copy of Internet Explorer or Firefox to make browsing more secure.

If you look at list of Google acquisitions, the one that stuck out until today was GreenBorder, which was listed as "internal use" rather than being associated with a product or service. When Google picked up GreenBorder in May 2007, it was rather curious. Experts and analysts had some wild guesses about how GreenBorder might be used inside Google.

Google's browser appears to accomplish more or less what most Google ventures do -- it makes a customizable, heavy-use Web experience a little more efficient. The comic book's explanation of Google Chrome talks a lot about using multiple-tabbed browsing, which was the feature that launched Mozilla's Firefox browser into popular use on the Web.

In other words, it's possible that Google's new browser would do heavier damage against Firefox than against Microsoft's Internet Explorer, at least initially, because Web-savvier users would be the most likely to switch to Chrome.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/02/google-browser-chrome-tak_n_123118.html

 

 

Will Google Chrome Change the Web World?

 

 

http://live.pirillo.com - Yes, I remember Netscape, and I never liked it. I also remember when Safari was made. Fast forward to today... and we now have Google Chrome. This is going to be Google's Web browser offering to the World.