Computerworld published an article this morning looking at just how "game changing" Google’s Chrome browser is.
In the article CEO of Xero, Rod Drury, Marketing manager of ProjectPartner and myself were interviewed.
Check it out here.
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I installed Chrome on day one - I’ve always prided myself with being on the bleeding edge and with web browsers it is no different - I had the RCs of Firefox three before they were fully released and Chrome was no different.
I have to admit though that I’ve just clicked the button on making Firefox my default browser again - Chrome is just too buggy.
It’s an interesting case of chicken and egg - is it the fault of non-compliant websites that they don’t render nicely in Chrome? Or is it a failing of the browser itself?
Either way there was just too much that didn’t work. I love Chrome - it’s quick, it’s mighty purty and it’s Google - the triumvirate that normally guarantees success - but in this case I’m afraid I’ll have to take a watching brief and come back to it once wither it works right, or most websites work right with it.
A guest post from the unreasonablemen.net
A year or so ago I went to a Salesforce.com event in which they trotted out a Google Apps exec to support their no software message. The guy (I forget his name) was delayed coming into Sydney and so was pretty jet lagged. His only piece of take home message “ we’re [at Google] a big believer in the no software message”
Kinda interesting considering you have to download and install the Chrome software (as an aside is the browser morphing to legendary status, the same but different from ‘software’). This aside, the point was this. Cloud delivered applications require a robust internet connection and a browser.
This dependency on the browser and its ability to arbitrage Google has meant they’ve had to act and build something. This to me is the same play as Android, something I wrote about a wee while ago. It has nothing to do with the browser, but everything to do with the internet services that Google wants to deliver or protect. Search, advertising and apps.
Android is about giving Google a play mobile where they have no current advertising stream. Chrome is about a applications platform (and i suspect) a tool to get more information about web habits (which will enhance the advertising business). Google needs this because the ability for adds to be blocked in a browser by a plugin (see Nick Carr’s two
pieces on Adblock) or by an ISP are trivial. This represents a very real threat to Google’s lifeblood… and to their credit they’ve innovated.
Microsoft is trying to but is clearly struggling… the browser as the OS of the future isn’t a picture that they particularly want. For that reason I believe they should get the hell outta the consumer market and focus on business. (more on this in a latter post). Microsoft are also failing in the mobile space. This piece by Tim O’Reilly really sums up the mess they’ve gotten themselves into. It also supports my hypothesis, Google’s building platforms that they are hoping will be web on-ramps. How successful they are in doing this will be interesting, given the issues they’ve had with robustness before. I actually don’t think they care if Chrome dominants or not, I believe that as long as there are others who jump on their path and deliver the same outcome…. Ads served up, easy and reliable access to applications they will be happy
A guest post from the unreasonablemen.net
A couple of reasons. Firstly unlike Firefox and Safari and of course the corporate supported IE, it doesn’t seem to get past the companies proxy server. Second, and most importantly to me I’m not prepared to give Google any more information about myself.
Don’t get my wrong, I’m a happy user of 3 Google services - mail, reader and analytics . But that’s about all i want Google to know about me. Read Write Web has a good history and synopsis of Google’s privacy stance. To me, reading that I get uneasy… real uneasy. Ben Kepes and I have debated this before, I can summarise his position as more trusting than mine. Simple as that.
I know that Google has a stated position of “do no evil”. I also know what happens in companies when they get squeeze for revenue and profit. Not always the right things. Reason number 1.
Another way to think about this. Google is a company of nearly 20 000 people, they’re like a small city in terms of population. And even small cities have bad people. In the US 1 in every 136 people have been caught and convicted of a crime, if you extrapolate that out it means you would expect a company the size of Google to have 147 bad people. 147 people who could mis-use all that data that they now have the potential to access.
End of the day its your choice, but you should be aware of the privacy issues associated with cloud services.
PS I’ve dropped Firefox and moved to Safari as my browser of choice. I’ll let you know how it goes.