Google Chrome: Headed For Home

As regular readers already know, I’ve covered Google’s new Chrome browser quite a bit in the last week-plus:

• Google Chrome: Tomorrow The Cloud, Today The Cellphone
• Google Chrome: EULA Backpeddles, Additional Vulnerabilities, O/S Alternatives And More Giggles
• Browsers, SSDs and Satellites: Monday Morning Updates

I think this post marks the end of the series, at least for the near future! To be clear up front, though, my intensive focus on Chrome these past 10 days has little to do with the browser itself (though I’m not quite as dismissive as Jim Lynch). Granted, Chrome does raise substantial additional privacy concerns beyond those I already had; now, the company’s able to track all of your browser-based activity, not just stuff that explicitly taps into Google services. And more optimistically, I find Chrome’s unique-software-process-per-tab approach both innovative and synergistic with the modern multi-core CPU era.

But my interest in Chrome more directly derives from three related aspects:

• Its role as a Trojan Horse to get Google Gears on computers, thereby cultivating an installed base for what many industry pundits believe is the finally-coming-soon era of ‘cloud computing’ (or, if you prefer, a revisit of the old mainframe-and-terminals model) which, by making a client computer’s O/S largely irrelevant, threatens Microsoft’s dominance in this area.
• Chrome’s open-source Chromium foundation, which many of you may consider incorporating in your future designs, and
• Chrome’s (and Chromium’s) WebKit rendering engine, along with its V8 multi-threaded JavaScript engine, both of which are also applicable to other browsers and HTML-based applications.

To that last point, first, I encourage you to check out an excellent recent writeup at Ars Technica entitled ‘Why Mozilla is committed to Gecko as WebKit popularity grows‘, which Slashdot also picked up, and which addresses the Gecko-vs-WebKit controversy that I raised in my first post of the Chrome series. Ars’s Ryan Paul does a great job of explaining Gecko’s origins at Netscape, as well as the intensive effort by the Mozilla Foundation in recent years to simplify and slim down Gecko, thereby broadening its platform applicability.

I didn’t know, for example, that Gecko is used by the Miro (formerly Democracy Player) and Songbird open-source media player development teams; I’ve discussed both applications in past posts. The Ars writeup also discusses why Gecko-based application use is now feasible for limited-memory and –processing mobile applications such as cell phones. To wit, I found interesting a claim published earlier this morning on Valleywag that Apple initially approached Opera to be the iPhone’s browser, before ultimately deciding to port WebKit-based Safari to the platform. And speaking of cellphone browsers, check out these additional resources:

• Mobile Safari vs. Opera Mobile vs. Skyfire: Who’s the Fastest? (not-tested Opera Mini, by the way, also does server-side processing prior to pass-on to a phone)
• Skyfire Available to All for a Limited Time (Skyfire, whose Beta 2 build I just upgraded to, has quickly become the primary browser I use on my T-Mobile Dash…though the fundamental business model of ‘free browser’ companies isn’t entirely clear to me…advertising?)
• NVIDIA And Opera Team To Accelerate The Full Web On Mobile Devices

In closing, here are some additional Chrome crumbs for you to chew on:

• The browser’s near-term popularity is likely to be muted, a function both of its beta status, of its current Windows-only compatibility, and of the installed base of (and users’ contentment with) other browsers such as Internet Explorer (for Windows) and Safari (for OS X), Firefox, and Opera. Although traffic stats on tech enthusiast sites like Ars Technica continue to be impressive (in spite of the fact that many tech enthusiasts are Chrome-largely-incompatible Linux users), more general adoption numbers have fallen after the initial-curiosity surge. But again, don’t underestimate the ancillary benefits to Google of that initial surge…Chrome installs = Google Gears installs.
• Speaking of installs, Microsoft’s Rob Mensching was, like me, quite disconcerted by Chrome’s auto-update-without-asking-permission strategy of a few days back.
• And speaking of Internet Explorer, Slashdot links to another excellent writeup on both it and Chrome’s process (versus thread, or monolithic)-per-tab approaches.
• Although Google has revised Chrome’s initially egregious terms of service, plenty of other Google products’ language remains troubling.
• Competition between formerly-best-buds Mozilla and Google? Exactly. Firefox 3.1 will answer Chrome’s (and IE8’s) ‘incognito’ schemes with a private-browsing mode of its own. And by the way, to clarify, whereas nothing you do in Chrome while in ‘incognito mode’ gets stored on your computer’s hard drive…it still gets sent to Google. "He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake"…
• And finally, to lighten your day as you head towards Saturday, Gizmodo passes along even more spoofs of the online comic that Google used to launch Chrome. The same NSFW warning applies as before…and before…

Happy weekend, all!