Google released their own web browser today, Google Chrome.
Right now it’s only available for Windows XP and Vista but I’m sure it
will be cross platform soon. It’s based on WebKit which is the same
rendering engine that Apple uses for Safari. This is a good things for
web developers as we won’t have to support another new rendering
engine. WebKit is open source and very standards compliant.
One major difference is Google’s focus on simplicity.
Taking a page out of Apple’s playbook they’ve decided to strip away
everything that isn’t needed and deliver a rocket fast simple browser.
They wrote their own Javascript engine that is supposed to be
significantly faster and I suspect they’ve learned a lot from Gmail and
other Google apps.
The clear business strategy is to deliver an application platform
for the web. If they have a web browser that compiles javascript to
native code for execution they’ve basically created the .Google
Framework for Windows. The Microsoft .Net Framework compiles C# to an
intermediate language which is then compiled to native code. Now Google
can use their toolsets like GWT to compile dynamically to native code
on a windows host. Imagine GMail running as fast as your native mail
client. The last part that’s needed is offline access. Google Gears
provides that feature already.
So, Google just delivered the tools to send a web application
directly to your desktop running at near native speed. You don’t need
to learn Silverlight, Flash or Adobe Air. Just HTML and javascript.
The platform wars are moving beyond Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux to
Silverlight Runtime vs. Adobe Air vs. Google Chrome.