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Meet Chrome - Google's Windows Killer

by: Michael Arrington September 02, 2008 | about stocks: GOOG / MSFT    

Michael Arrington

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Make no mistake. The cute comic book and the touchy-feely talk about user experience is little more than a coat of paint on top of a monumental hatred of Microsoft (MSFT).

Chrome, the Webkit-based Google (GOOG) browser that launches today at Google.com/chrome, will give them a real foothold on the desktop and way more control over how web applications perform. While it seems that Chrome is aimed at IE and Firefox, the target is really Windows.

They’ve built their own Javascript engine despite the fact that Webkit already has one. This should make Ajax applications like Gmail and Google Docs absolutely roar. When combined with Gears, which allows for offline access (see what MySpace did with Gears to understand how powerful it is), Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows.

Expect to see millions of web devices, even desktop web devices, in the coming years that completely strip out the Windows layer and use the browser as the only operating system the user needs. That was going to happen anyway, but Chrome + Gears just made the decision a whole lot easier for hardware manufacturers to make.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is stuck with a bloated closed source browser that they don’t even tether to their search engine for fear of more antitrust woes. Google can push their search engine and other web services all day long on Chrome, with no government interference. So not only will Chrome drive lots of incremental revenue to Google, it also paves the way for a Microsoft-free computing experience.

I love Chrome already and I haven’t even tried it yet (nor will I be using it much soon, since it will only work on Windows for now). But Google’s days of unchecked growth may soon come to an end. They are quickly becoming the new Microsoft.

Update: Google giveth and Google taketh away - the Chrome site is now down.

Google appears to have soft-launched this site for Google Chrome, its open source browser, which is slated for release on Windows today.

The site provides the screenshot above, plus a set of demonstration videos that can’t actually be played because they have either been removed or set to private. We’ve uploaded the splash screens to these videos so you can at least get a fuzzy sense of what Chrome’s features look like:

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This article has 12 comments:

  •  
    Sep 02 01:44 AM
    Microsoft/Google browser war.

    Typical corporate zero-sum warfare, which only results in confusion and will put computer industry back into the dark age of multiple OS systems when chaos, incompatibility and unnecessarily long development time, higher costs were the norms.

    Back in the dark ages of multiple OS, developers had to spend much more time for developing one application because they had to support multiple OS's: microsoft ms/dos, ibm ms/dos, atari, digital dos, ibm os/2, macintosh, etc.

    Those days are coming back: at the worst of time ever, when the US is losing its grip on world economic dominance.

    I recently travelled to South Korea, and did a bit of web surfing for their local sites there, I was surprised at how nice and fancy their websites were, seemed light years ahead of typical websites offered by American companies.

    I found out that it was because their developers only program against one standard, IE, and don't spend any time for supporting other browsers, that way, they take a maximum advantage of one set of technologies and spend more time for developing contents and less time worrying about compatility issues, which US web developers can't afford.
    Reply
  •  
    Sep 02 02:16 AM
    Google Chrome as an OS? Unfortunately we have seen that movie some years ago. Remember the web-surfing appliances of yesteryear like Sony eVilla or 3Com Audrey and Kerbango? How about Compaq iPaq or Netpliance I-opener? Didn't think so:

    Why Google Chrome is not a "Windows Killer"
    counternotions.com/200.../
    Reply
  •  
    Sep 02 05:43 AM
    GOOG is a formidable opponent in this war. If there needs to be an OS opponent, then GOOG is the most suited. No one else compares.
    Reply
  •  
    Sep 02 06:22 AM
    My Take -- your comment makes a lot of sense if you think that Vista and IE are good products.

    'Nuff said. :-)
    Reply
  •  
    Sep 02 08:41 AM
    Google is buildling a better mousetrap. Once the beta tests are over I expect to be catching more mouses than that horrible often ignored product called Internet Explorer.
    Reply
  •  
    Sep 02 10:51 AM
    "if you think that Vista and IE are good products."

    Lisa, I have never used Vista, so I don't have any comment on it. I have no need to upgrade from my XP.

    OS technology had reached a good-enough level with MIcrosoft XP years ago, and with somewhere between IE 6 and 7, browser technology also has reached a level where there are no real complaints from customers. OS and browser technologies are now kind of commodity technologies.

    I hope that US tech companies spend time on innovation than killing their brain cells over styles.

    While those evil companies like Google and Microsoft waste precious resources of US engineer minds for needless corporate feud, other nations will put their brain resources in good use and will overtake the US.

    It happened in a car industry, it can happen in computer industry too.
    Reply
  •  
    Sep 02 11:10 AM
    US companies were the source of innovcations in tech industry. Now with Google and Microsoft war, it seems obvious that they are trying to reinvent the wheels made by the other.

    Is this the sign of time that there are not much left for true innovation in software? or those companies like Google and Microsoft are just evil companies like GM and Ford which wasted their engineers' minds over styles for years while Toyota and others were pickinig up their engineers' minds for innovation?

    Either way, the end is near for software industry dominance for the US.
    Reply
  •  
    Sep 02 12:25 PM
    My Take - I happen to disagree with you. Microsoft has been an anchor on the industry, and given that Korea is not known for their "progressive web sites" but rather according to you only sucking up to the big gorilla. Truth be told, the world is moving away from the desktop stronghold... that is the industry EXCEPT Microsoft -- most notably after they got shut out of Y! following a continually dismal OS record. Microsoft needs to quit asserting it is the dominant player when in fact they are not and put their efforts into more of what its customers want, rather than what MS wants. Even MS OS's are becoming a laughing stock -- the day I used Apple OSX I realized that Microsoft is a joke -- a complete joke.
    Reply
  •  
    Sep 02 01:15 PM
    I am an average PC user and use PC all the time like most every one else who work in a corporate world. The fact is that I never shut down my PC and leave it on even when I go for a long vacation. The XP keeps on going and going and going. I don't even think about what OS I am using and it's just there all the time working in the background. That's what OS is supposed to do. XP does a darn good job in that. That technology was achieved years ago and still big US tech companies like Google drain US brain resources in those nearly commodity techs.

    While US tech companies are zero-sum no-tech purely-style quarrels, other countries are catching up and overtaking it.

    Japan is nearly destorying US car companies with their hybrid techs. Korea's Samsung destroyed dozens of high-tech US chip companies which were busy doing cut-throat competion with each other.

    And US? We are still trying to find the next wheel to reinvent, at least in the software industry.

    As long as Google and Microsoft play their hate games, US software dominance days are numbered. Tech companies are supposed to innovate, not play politics. Sigh.
    Reply
  •  
    Sep 02 05:12 PM
    You silly Wall Street people. You scratch the surface thinking that this is a blood-thirsty competition between big corporate companies before digging deeper and understand what the technology behind Chrome is about.

    When I heard about Chrome, I first asked myself, why should I switch to it? I love Firefox already with some useful plugins so I don’t see much of a reason to switch to it. Like many of you, I thought Google was reinventing the wheel. So I read on…

    Chrome is NOT an operating system!! Jumping into such a conclusion after seeing the word “os” shows that you lack the understanding on the technology behind Chrome. Chrome behaves like an operating system in terms of memory and process management, unlike current browsers that work on a singular memory address space. Instead of forking a thread within its browser process, Chrome creates an entirely new process. The disadvantage to this is that it has more overhead because it takes more resources to create a new process (allocating a new address space) than to fork a new thread (since the memory space is already their from the parent browser process). The advantages are that it scales better, incurs less memory fragmentation, and a bad web page does not crash the whole browser along with other webpages you’re viewing. The memory fragmentation is abstracted back up to the operating system (.ie Microsoft Windows) to handle the process memory management.

    Chrome is built on Webkit, which is a standard web browser toolkit that helped build Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and KDE’s Konquerer. It is also open source so that other developers could propel forward the user internet experience. If you think this will cause user confusion as to which browser to choose, consider Microsoft’s IE. So far, it is closed source and not W3C standard compliant (W3C maintains an international web rendering standard). They’re changing though, because they’ve stated that IE8 will be standards compliant.

    I don’t deny that Google is trying to take some of the desktop user experience from Microsoft. They’ve already been doing that with Google Desktop Search against Windows Search and with Picasa (a photo organization software). But before you label this as a corporate hate game, get your facts straight. Steve Ballmer may hate Google, but Google does not hate Microsoft, considering their Chrome browser only works on Windows so far. Admitting that you are an average PC user is not a sin, but commenting like you’re more than that is.
    Reply
  •  
    Sep 04 02:23 AM
    Yup, Chrome is a threat to Windows. But what many people are missing is that it's also a threat to Apple's OS -- if Chrome becomes the operating system of choice, why pay up for a Mac instead of buying the best value hardware that will run Chrome?
    Reply
  •  
    Sep 11 06:06 AM
    I agree with this article to a great extent. The browser is awesome and it has got great features. Especially one single box to work with URL as well in search is awesome. Security enhancements like sandbox security is defnitely good. Overall it is a IE killer. :) .

    googleschromium.blogsp.../
    Reply
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