“Google Inc’s new browser software is designed to work ‘invisibly’ and will run any application that runs on Apple Inc’s Safari Web browser, company officials said on Tuesday,” Eric Auchard reports for Reuters.
The company said the new Web browser, dubbed Google Chrome — a long-anticipated move to compete with Microsoft Corp, Mozilla Firefox and other browsers — is now available for download [WIndows-only beta currently],” Auchard reports.
MacDailyNews Take: Google, get a Mac version out ASAP before you alienate the group who could be your most ardent allies.
“Google Chrome relies on Apple’s WebKit software for rendering Web pages, he said. It also has taken advantage of features of community-developed browser Firefox from Mozilla Corp. Google is a primary financial backer of Mozilla,” Auchard reports. “‘If you are Webmaster, and your site works in Apple Safari then it will work very well in Google Chrome,’ Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management said at a news conference at the company’s Mountain View, California headquarters.”
“Apple WebKit is widely used by Web developers, not simply for Apple applications like the iPhone but also by Google itself with its mobile phone software, called Android,” Auchard reports. “‘We have borrowed good ideas from others,’ Pichai said. ‘Our goal here was to bring our point of view but do it in a very open way,’ he said in response to a reporter’s question.”
“‘We don’t want to live in a world where all that (innovation) is locked up and kept secret,’ Google co-founder Larry Page told the news conference. Page was a primary supporter of the Chrome project among Google’s executive team,” Auchard reports. “Sergey Brin, Page’s fellow co-founder, said Google planned to continue to work closely with Mozilla and hoped to see future version of Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox become more unified over time.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Martin” for the heads up.]
Walt Mossberg’s First Test of Google’s New Browser:
Read Mossberg’s full review here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Trevor” for the heads up.]
Return of the First Post!
installed, very fast (faster then FireFox (v3)) tabs are a bit interesting, sitting on top of the window instead of between address bar and web page, also when you open a link in a new tab it shows up next to the page you opened it from instead of at the end of the list of tabs…
Everything seems to look good though.
He focuses on Chrome vs. IE, but the real story is Chrome vs. Safari and Firefox, if you ask me.
Im all for competition….force innovation…etc…. but another browser? Safari, camino, firefox, chrome, opera, IE, netscape…..i have safari and firefox….and i mostly use one over the other….so where does this fit in?
Are they just trying to take the #2 spot next to IE or safari?i dont get it…
This may in fact be my favorite browser on Windows. It surpasses Safari in stability and responsiveness. I’m glad to see a tide of support for standards. Not even MSFT can build a levee big enough to hold back the water.
@cool butt…
I think Netscape only lives on in our hearts and memories.
This isn’t actually about web browsers. It’s an attack primarily on Windows and a pretty sneaky one at that. Google’s been gearing
up for it for awhile. Pun intended.
“Google OS Arrives, In the Form of a Browser”
<excerpt>”While this move can be seen as a challenge to Microsoft on the browser front, it’s more of a threat to Microsoft’s Windows operating system. By developing its own open-source browser, Google is able to establish de-facto standards for Web applications.”
The rest:
(http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080902-093143)
Inside information. Google should be ousted out of Apple’s board
P.S. Why would you ever upgrade Windows (or Office) again if XP is adequate and Chrome runs all of your business programs? Since it’s fully open source vertical programmers can have at it. Yet, the same goes for OS X (once Chrome is ported). Or you could load Linux for free or cheaply and skip the others. It makes me wonder if Google is working on a bootable Chrome (like Android is for mobiles).
I’m cautiously optimistic about this. Diversity in browser choice is good.
Of today’s “big four” browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera), only Firefox is 100% open-source. Safari’s Webkit rendering engine is open-source, but the browser itself is closed-source. For those of us who place high value on open source, that seems a bit of a shame. So Chrome is that open-source Webkit-based desktop browser we’ve been waiting for.
Additionally, a lot of the ideas they present in their online comic thingy sound very good indeed. I’m guessing part of their motivation behind doing this is to *show* the other browser-makers how things can be done, rather than simply asking and hoping. In that sense, it benefits everyone, since it takes those ideas out of the theoretical realm, and the ones which truly do work better will eventually be adopted by the other browser makers.
My current disappointments have to do with no mention of customizability (as we’ve come to expect from browsers such as Firefox), the lack of attention paid to cookies when they talk about sandboxing (though as Google makes use of tracking cookies, that’s unfortunately not much of a surprise), and the fact that it’s currently only available for Windoze (yes, I know, it makes sense to target them first, since the goal is to get people out of IE and into something that’s standards-compliant, but dagnabbit, I wanna play with it too!).
Still, on the whole, I think this is a very good thing. And hey! If Google doesn’t behave nicely with it, it’s all open-source, so others can come along and fork it to their hearts’ content (see GNU IceCat).
In the end MS has done this to themselves in that they still do not understand the difference between succeeding by forcibly controlling a market, and succeeding by delivering a well developed product that is meant to be competed with. If MS is ever successfully normalized, then I hope it’s the last we ever see of world domination by a company or anything or anyone else for that matter. There is almost never one single solution.
Hummmm
Anyone else ever notice that we’ve never seen Walt Mossberg and José Ferrer in same room together at same time ?
BC
Except it will not run on a Mac… Unless you run Unity!
Yet another reason for web designers to ensure Safari compatibility.
I’m using it right now as an experiment, and it’s a nice smooth browser. Give it time, and it’ll come to the Mac.
I do agree the biggest stopper for me is the lack of the Firefox Plugin system. Too much useful stuff there to just throw away.
I hope in time the two browsers swap ideas and eventually merge into the one entity.
I think the purpose of the Comic is to give potential users some reasons to switch. It is afterall just another browser that does pretty much the same things as all the others. Without the comic, I’d give it a shot, think it’s nice but nothing special, and go back to Firefox. Which is what I did with Safari for Windows.
You need to give something New and Cool to make people switch.
So I will use it today, and then probably go back to the Fox.
I think Cubert hit the nail on the head with “Yet another reason for web designers to ensure Safari compatibility.”
This could be huge in HELPING Safari and iPhone (and Mac) internet compatibility. In my company, the internal business processing portal site is coded using MS tools that specifically target (and function right) on IE with the excuse in the past being the MS has 98% of the market, it would cost to much in resources to make things work with the other browsers. Naturally this does not run with any Mac compatible browser so that continues to shut Macs out.
Now that IE is down to 72% and continuing to fall, this just adds one more way to pull market share from IE. Ultimately doing the world good. MDN key work ‘dark’ as in the dark days of IE dominance might soon finally, be at an end.
Business users trust Google. Look for a new Chrome home page launches apps, that compiles Gears/JavaScript apps to run locally, spins off tabs to look like apps, stores files in the Cloud and behaves like 95% of what you would want from an OS.
I agree with the above comments – if most of your workers/family can run Google Office and Google apps from the internet’s cloud or your LAN’s cloud, then why ever upgrade your PC OS, especially if the OS itself has not really innovated.
I don’t want to move everything to the cloud, but I like the choice.
Google Chrome blows away the competition ( Safari, Mozilla and IE) in Javascript performance test.
Look at the performance graphs and numbers at
http://monitor20.blogspot.com/2008/09/chrome-blows-aways-safari-ie-and.html
a Mac version is coming as you can see from this blog entry byt eh Google Mac team:
http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/09/platforms-and-priorities.html
Interestingly, the web software my company uses only really works in IE because of some proprietary coding. When we open it in Safari, there’s an odd graphical glitch that shows up. It doesn’t appear in Firefox or Opera. It does, now, appear in Chrome. So there are some real structural similarities in the browsers.
No Zune Tang yet to give some uplifting comments about the “excellence” of IE8?!?
Kirk that is because Firefox includes specific coding to deal with aspects of IE that isn’t using true web standards. WebKit refuses to bend in this way (though no doubt Google could do so if it wanted too). But that shows the confidence in this stategy and is a real sign of the shift in the future of computing.
It will now be Webkit and related browsers that dictate the mobile web and eventually when you control the mobile web you will force open standards on all browsers mobile or desktop and dictate all the web standards. This is good news for us all it is the day that Microsofts attempt to control the future is dead as the Dodo and probably IE will now gradually decline and shrivel and only survive by copying what webkit browsers and Firefox as it integrates with them dictate. And as cloud computing becomes increasingly popular Windows itself will struggle to survive. Apple will have to be careful long run too but is nimble enough to adapt and adopt to flourish.
Well As I said in a previous post on the other “Chrome” thread. It’s all about getting the IT guys to install standards based browsers. And it’s also about educating Mr & Mrs Average to the fact that they have choices.
What every one of us and every other Computer literate, web savvy person needs to do is email all of their friends and explain to them that there are choices and that whatever comes with their computer is not their only way to surf the web.
A bunch of people every day realise they are still living in the early 90s and have an epiphany to go out and get a computer. They know absolutely nothing about what they are doing so they go to the nearest electronics shop and probably end up buying a Windows PC because that’s all there is there in the shop right!.
Ok, so we, the Mac community, have lost a potential new member but at least we may educate the unfortunate Windows buyer that they don’t have to make ALL the bad choices and can use something other than the turd of a browser (IE) that came with their PC.
Now as Chrome is using Webkit and Apple never had a problem with people making competing browsers that use Webkit, then I am sure Apple look upon Chrome as being an ally rather than an enemy product. In fact I would be surprised if Steve Jobs didn’t know and applaud Google’s decision to do this. After all, Google have a biger name in the web business than Apple do.
Now if Chrome takes off then that means less Microsoft IE users being locked into a non standards “bag of cack” browser and it’s a step in the right direction and that’s what it’s all about.
Once, Firefox, Safari and Chrome have a huge combined chunk of browser share developers who develop solely for IE will jump ship and move to web standards and nothing much will work correctly in IE any more. If enough brave developers no longer code for IE then stubborn IE supporting IT departments will be under pressure to install alternative browsers and voila! Bye bye IE. Microsoft will be forced to conform totally and solely to standards or dye. And as a web developer myself I long for that day.
There are so many cool web standards that have been slow to emerge or be adopted because or the combination of IE’s proliferation and Microsoft’s refusal to fully support standards.
So let’s hope Chrome encourages people to look at alternatives to IE and let’s see if we can tell a few people about their choices.
I have a few questions.
Is Google’s Chrome actually the Opus browser originally developed at the UIUC under Samuel King ?
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Is-There-Room-for-a-Security-Browser/
If so, is he and his team being given credit / $$$ ?
If not, was this idea “borrowed” ?
OK, it’s Grand Final time. i was a bit peeved at no Mac version (yet) but if it’s the team that’ll help womp MS them I’ll back ’em.