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With Chrome, Google's Not Fighting The Last Browser War


It's trying to shift the focus to running Web applications, not viewing pages

By Mary Hayes Weier Thomas Claburn Roger Smith
InformationWeek
September 6, 2008 12:00 AM (From the September 8, 2008 issue)

Google's release of its open source Chrome browser at high noon on Sept. 2 promises to bring a new dimension to the browser wars, which have been smoldering lately even as Mozilla released Firefox 3 and Microsoft released the beta of Internet Explorer 8.

The beta version of Chrome presents a dilemma to business IT teams. Features like its crash-resistant "sandbox" approach to tabs point to the future of Web-centric desktops. But Google isn't talking about administrative tools to make it practical in an enterprise; the browser works only on Windows XP/Vista, though Mac and Linux versions are promised; and the security advances in Chrome's architecture don't extend to rich Internet applications, or RIAs, that use Java, Flash, and Silverlight plug-ins, which are proliferating in the corporate world.


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Bottom line: Chrome is beta software that remains a work in progress, though it has enough interesting features to make it suitable for more adventurous business IT pilot projects. For most employees, it could just be one more thing that makes their home computers cooler than the ones at work.



Not an OS, says Brin (left), but a "very fast engine"

Photo by Kimberly White/Reuters/Landov

Why is Google entering the already-crowded browser market? Because its future is directly tied to the continued proliferation of Web apps, which require improvements in browsers at a faster pace than the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation can afford, or that Microsoft, with its stake in licensed software, shows an interest in driving. Google is impatient to give people better access to its massive data centers and believes it needs to build a browser from scratch with the goal of shifting the focus to running applications, not just displaying pages.

Businesses are demanding more from their browsers because of the ever-growing number of Web apps. For those Salesforce.com customers who "live in the app," Chrome's isolated sandbox approach--which keeps one business app from dragging down others' performance--is appealing, says Adam Gross, VP of Salesforce developer marketing. "It speaks to a world not about Web sites you visit once, but apps like Salesforce or Gmail that you live in all day, every day," Gross says.

Sridhar Vembu, CEO of AdventNet/Zoho, the company behind the Zoho Web suite, which has word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and databases, also touts Chrome's Google Gears technology, which makes online applications available offline. The Chrome team implemented this concept with a multiprocessing architecture similar to that in Microsoft's recent IE8 beta, which provides the same isolation capabilities in the browser that are found in modern operating systems.


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