Chrome needs more than just sparkle

• Tags:
• Operating System,
• Browser,
• Incremental,
• Chrome

Leader ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 02 Sep 2008 15:07 BST

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Deep in the Redmond war room, the radar screens are showing a major threat. But then, chrome makes for a lousy stealth aircraft.

Google's latest move — long-awaited, but no less exciting for that — is absolutely unambiguous. By moving key security, performance and management technologies into the browser, the company is demonstrating a web-wide world where the operating system is less Vista, more vestigial.

For all that, Chrome is incremental. It doesn't matter how good the architecture is or how smart Google's strategy around it, it enters a crowded field with lots of players and even more variables. Even if it's technically perfect, it won't be a good platform for web applications if nobody's using it.

The curious thing about web browsers is that a good one is invisible — it knows that nobody wants to use it. They want to use the web. One tabbed browser with decent security and good compatibility is much like another, especially if it spends as much time as possible not getting in the way. Google has to have a persuasive story to make people move.

That story is trust. By taking extra care to explain how Chrome works, why each feature is there and what its designers were thinking, then emphasising that the component technologies are free and open to the community, Google is directly attacking the areas where Microsoft is weakest. These are also the areas where users need the most assurance; the web, for all its intimacy and power, still feels like a dangerous place to lead your entire life. Yet that's where people have to go, if Google's game plan is to succeed, and users have to feel confident they're being protected by the community as much as by the vendors.

And, once that move has been made — the incremental step Chrome is designed for — then the next stage will be to wean people off their desktop applications and into the browser; after that, to cut free of the operating system altogether. It'll be a long migration, with plenty of known and unknown challenges. But the threat to the incumbents is there, and it's real. If Google succeeds, it will change the world.

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