Browser battle begins
Google set tongues wagging last week when it announced it had developed an open-source Web browser after long having said it had no need to be in the browser market. It represents a big escalation in hostilities with Microsoft.
The browser, known as Chrome, is still in “beta” but already it is getting rave reviews. Though it lacks key features, including the ability to read Web feeds, it is enjoying wide praise for its speed, particularly when displaying Web-based applications such as Google’s own Gmail service and Yahoo’s Zimbra productivity tools, as well as its clean, minimalistic user interface.
But why did Google feel the need to release its own browser? CEO Eric Schmidt said a few years ago that browsers belonged to the previous generation of technology wars.
What’s more perplexing is that Google already sponsors a browser, the open-source Firefox application, whose developers continue to receive millions of dollars in funding each year from Google in exchange for the search giant’s being the browser’s default search engine. Why not simply continue to support Firefox? After all, Google recently pledged to continue supporting the browser financially until 2011.
There are probably several reasons for Google’s decision, the main one being its fear that Microsoft could use its own browser, the ubiquitous Internet Explorer (IE), more aggressively to drive people to its own, rival online services.
That Microsoft hasn’t already done this is probably because it is wary of competition regulators, especially in Europe. The last thing it needs is to be seen to be using its near-monopoly in Windows as a weapon to take market share from its rivals on the Web.
Google is also acutely aware of the fact that IE8, the next version of IE, will include software that will allow users to block online advertisements. Web ads are Google’s bread and butter and including an ad blocker in IE8 could present a challenge to the search giant’s business model.
Though IE8 wouldn’t have been the trigger behind Google’s decision to develop Chrome — the company says it has been developing the browser for two years — it’s likely to add urgency to the initiative.
Google says it decided to create its own browser after its employees had “dreamt up a lot of features we felt could improve the Web”. There’s probably some truth to this. As computing goes online and as applications are increasingly delivered as a service on the Internet, it is important that the browser’s underlying “engine” is tuned and optimised to ensure these new-generation apps load and respond quickly.
The most important work that Google has done with Chrome is optimising the JavaScript engine that underpins many online apps, including Gmail and Google Docs, the company’s rival to Microsoft Office.
Online Web apps hold out the ultimate promise of rendering Microsoft’s business model of selling packaged software largely irrelevant. Google is betting that in future, when broadband is ubiquitous, people will use mainly free online apps to do their work. Already, many people have migrated their e-mail, diaries and documents to the Web.
The danger for Microsoft is that Chrome — and other Web browsers — could turn Windows into what former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy predicted in the mid-1990s: little more than a set of device drivers, with computing tasks performed on the network. If that happens, the operating system will no longer matter. In a world where the Web browser is the window through which people work and communicate, it won’t matter which operating system they use.
As McNealy predicted — a decade too early as it turns out — the network is becoming the computer.
First published as the column Technology & You in the Financial Mail of September 12 2008
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