Google Chrome Win Browser War Is ti Possible?

Google Chrome starts the Third Great Browser War

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The overwhelming comments are however those concerning what will happen, hereafter, in the browsers market considering that Google has decided to play on its own and not to simply financially support Mozilla: currently the Red Panda Foundation has a deal with Mountain View comprising the implementation of Google search features within Firefox, in exchange of a sum amounting, in 2006, to 57 millions of dollars that is 85% of company incomes. The deal has been renewed till 2011 some days before the Chrome launch, but it’s certain that with its expiration Mozilla’s fate will be put heavily at stake as admitted by CEO John Lily.

And if Mozilla, that has so far eroded market shares to Internet Explorer till the reach of a remarkable 20% have to worry, Microsoft is the corporation that have to think (and lose) more about the Google move: sure, IE can still reckon on the fact of being preinstalled on Windows OSs, but Google has to its side the privileged relationship with who uses the Net day by day, its “being” the Net for many because of search, the Gmail webmail, the applications and web services that see the Chrome browser as their ideal completion.

Survived to the dot-com speculative bubble, Google is the company that above all has shaped the computer hi-tech of the last years to its own image, and the results of the first week of Chrome life are eloquent: according to the evaluations the Gbrowser would have been able to already surpass the 1% market share of Opera, one of the “minor” browsers that together with Safari has spurred competition so far but has never consumed so much of the IE predominance.

The first browser war (1996-2004) saw the opposition of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, and the Microsoft browser had an easy match into crushing its competitor because of the integration into Windows. The second browser war (2004-2008) saw the birth and evolution of strong open source alternatives leaded by the above said Mozilla Firefox, together with the burst of net services as complements or substitutes of the traditional software-in-a-box on which Microsoft has always ruled.

The third great war has been started by Google seemingly against everyone, but it isn’t so difficult to foretell that Chrome will be the beginning of a new phase of the commercial and technological confrontation between the two giants of today’s personal computing, Google and Microsoft, that from the skirmishes and “cloud computing” marketing vaporware shifts to a real clash for the supremacy in what has become the privileged tool to knowledge access, purchase, sharing, entertainment and to studying in the information society.

Insofar as the effects of Chrome release on the spreading of “alternative” browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari have to be proven, it can be said that Google have already cannibalized Mozilla and the open source technology: Chrome contains pieces of Firefox code, more than Safari rendering engine, and the new alternative to IE overwhelming power is surely build on the strength of the “Google” brand (by now more attractive than the “Microsoft” brand), but mostly on the opportunity to reuse open source platforms already widely adopted as market standards and passed through the effort of cooperative coding distinguishing quality projects like those brought by Mozilla.

Google Chrome for a Test Drive

The ultra-ambitious Google has set the bar high once again with their newest idea ... Google Chrome. Knowing that most browsers are built on ideas and foundations of the 1990's, with lots of band aids on top, Google has decided to start from right now and make a browser based on today's needs ... web apps like banking, gaming, media playback, etc. The kind of things that put other browsers into overdrive.

The first thing I have to say is ... wow. When they said fast, I thought, yeah, right. Knowing that most of the delay in rendering a web page comes from the slow response time of a web server (or its more often invoked culprit, the advertising server), I though that there was little that a browser could do to make things faster. I was wrong.

After an initial test drive, I have to say that Google Chrome really did render web pages Noticeably faster than my current fave Firefox, as well as Safari and Internet Explorer. This is based on something Google calls WebKit. If you're not shocked (shocked!) by the speed, then I'll eat my Chrome.

If you want to know more about the ideas and features behind Google Chrome, you can check out the comic (some would call it a graphic novel) that explains the new ideas in both a complex and simple way, at the same time. This makes everybody happy

DOWNLOAD: Google Chrome