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What Chrome really means

Posted on 14 Nov 2008 at 12:10

Google may insist it's only a browser, but Chrome has the operating system in its sights.

Chrome may look like just another browser, but in reality it's a landmark development in the evolution of the web - and indeed of personal computing as a whole. That may surprise you: after all, Chrome does basically the same job as any other browser, and doesn't fundamentally change the way we interact with the web.

But Chrome is important not because of what it does now, but because of what it makes possible in the future. We're all familiar with Google's online services - Google Search, Gmail, Google Docs and so on - but with Chrome it now has a tailor-made method of delivering them.

"So what?" you might say. One of the fundamental merits of the web is that you can access any site with any browser, from any sort of computer - provided the web designer has done his job properly. You can still use all of Google's sites from Firefox, or any other browser, so it's not immediately obvious how Chrome changes the game.

But Google wants to build more features into its online services - and it claims that current releases of IE and Firefox wouldn't handle the increased size and complexity this would entail. "We're at the very limits of what you can do without crashing the browser," explained Eric Tholome, Google's product managing director of applications, at the launch in London.

So Google's solution is Chrome - a new browser designed from the ground up to handle complex online applications. First impressions certainly suggest that it's faster and more stable than its rivals, which means that Google's developers can indeed set their sights higher than before.

Playing catch-up

We don't expect a dramatic change in Google's services overnight. It's too early to establish a proper picture of Chrome's penetration into the browser market, but by all accounts fewer than 5% of regular web users have made the switch in the first month of release. If Google were to upgrade its applications to take full advantage of Chrome's extra power today, more than 95% of potential users would be left behind.

In the mid-term, however, Google will surely be planning to expand its offerings. It makes no sense to create a browser with the express purpose of enabling more powerful web applications and then not take advantage of that power.

But by the time that happens, Chrome shouldn't be the only browser that can handle the pace. Firefox 3.1 is set to debut a JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey, which promises to be several times faster than the current version. And since Chrome is open source, other projects are free to appropriate Chrome's techniques to achieve the same performance, or even incorporate its supercharged V8 JavaScript engine directly into their own browsers. However it happens, Chrome has established a performance baseline for other browsers to emulate. In the long run they'll find ways to achieve it, and the type of rich web applications Google envisages will become reality.

That's great news for the end user, of course, and Google likes to present Chrome as almost philanthropic. "Open standards are a way to help all browsers get better," declares program manager Chris DiBona in the comic book accompanying Google Chrome.

Next-generation web apps

But if Chrome prompts all browsers to upgrade their support for web applications, the biggest beneficiary is the company that provides those applications - Google itself. The company has built up a huge portfolio of high-profile interactive websites, not only its signature web search tools but also services such as Blogger, Google Books, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Gmail and YouTube - not to mention desktop products that interface with internet resources, such as Google Earth, Google Talk and Chrome itself.