So, google took a step into the browser market this week with the announcement (and subsequent launch) of Chrome, their webkit based browser. This has been widely blogged about as an interesting move, for various reasons.
Of course, the technology is the first one, with the process-per-tab model being there to stop it from crashing horribly when one tab is dealing with a website that decides to go off on one. A nice idea indeed, as is the idea of jailing off plugins in a similar way (I’ve got pissed off with Flash taking down Firefox at work now, so am currently running with Flashblock enabled to stop this). In a strange turn of events, Microsoft actually got there first with the process-per-tab idea with IE8, so I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Firefox and other browsers look into it.
The main thing, however, that caught my attention was the idea that they’d get much of the market share. As much as we hate it, Internet Explorer has the majority of this, and in the corporate environment things aren’t too likely to change any time soon (especially not with webapps still being deployed that make use of activex controls and broken rendering). This leaves us with Firefox in a comfortable second, albeit miles behind, then Opera, Safari and some other browsers (I’ve not researched this, I’m just going on what makes sense). So where would Chrome fit in?
To my mind, there are two groups of users when it comes to browsers – those who are stuck in their ways using IE, and those who are happy to switch. Obviously the first group is a lost cause, so lets look at the second. This savvy group has already abandoned IE for some other platform, be it Opera or Firefox. To my mind (and at least in my own experience), they’ve likely got whichever browser they picked configured how they wanted; with the extensions and plugins they want installed and set up. Everything just works.
So, how do Google then get these users to move to Chrome? It’s an interesting puzzle. So far (having not used it myself due to the lack of Linux build) people seem impressed with the speed, but miss their extensions (especially an adblock one – which I’m sure google would love to implement) and have found that it is possible to crash the whole thing. Convicing these users to move over is clearly going to take more than a bit of a speed improvement over Firefox. People will want their extensions, and this provides an interesting technological problem for Chrome if it wants to stick with the jailing that they seem to have happily advertised everywhere in their documentation.
Of course, it’s still very early days, and I’ve yet to use it – so will reserve judgement on how well it works until I have – but it’ll be interesting to see how it does in the marketplace.