Google: We want Chrome to grow the Web
Since the unveiling its own browser, Google's continued support of Firefox has been somewhat puzzling. But to the world's dominant Web search provider, helping increase the amount of Web use ultimately means more Google searches.
Google has been a good partner to Mozilla over the years, pumping tens of millions of dollars into the open-source foundation that have helped make Firefox arguably the best browser in the world.
More recently with the launch of its open-source Chrome browser, however, Google became both partner and competitor to Mozilla. Given the potential to hurt Firefox adoption, it's interesting to note Google's calculus for introducing Chrome, as detailed in a recent O'Reilly Radar interview with Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience:
We think that, overall, if you make the Web better, people use the Web more. And that ultimately benefits Google because we believe that search is a certain and rather fixed percentage of people's online activities each day. It's hovered right around 5 percent from the very beginning of the Internet...If that's true, one way we can grow search is by gaining market share from other competitors. The other way we can gain share is by just growing the market overall, where we don't necessarily gain share but we gain on overall volume.
So we have a number of things that we do that try and make the Web more pleasant and easy to use...As we looked at the browser market, people have gotten really good at rendering HTML. But there hasn't been a lot of innovation. And there's been almost no attention on JavaScript at all. And so we thought we could build a browser that is just a lot faster for the Web, and it's much more optimized for JavaScript.
As Mayer further details, Google doesn't expect to be the source of all browser innovation. It wants to continue working with Firefox, for example, helping prod the market forward.
As Mozilla CEO John Lilly has said, increased competition in the browser market can spark innovation. Competition isn't comfortable, but because it pushes vendors to do their best work and "often results in innovation of one sort or another," it's ultimately good for customers and competitors.
This is why we should be cheering Google's entry into the browser market--even if we ultimately want Firefox to win. Perhaps especially if we want Firefox to win.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
The whole reason i went back to 1 when i tested out 2 (when it was initially released as beta) was because of that terrible "feature" called Full Page Zoom eating up so much resources.
I'm don't have particularly bad vision, and even if i DID, i STILL wouldn't force the terrible feature on people, it is a waste of resources.
Leave that crap to an extension if, GOD forbid, they want everything to zoom "consistently", or, for the love of god, please start using the OPTIONS more, give me the choice, at least.
At least have some sort of options hidden away like about:config, it won't confuse people who don't know about it.
"Stop trying to help me cross the road, i can walk and see perfectly fine."
Just doing something as simple as loading the Bebo homepage, i hit 90% on both cores, and it massively disrupts every other tab AND other programs. (it isn't just that site, though, it has been happening with a lot of them)
This is unacceptable. I'm going back to Version 1, screw version 2, and i will be disabling the auto-updater now.
And a further kick in the teeth was the fact that Multiple Accounts never made this release, and scrolling is still quite horrible.
Really, really not impressed by this move. It was a similar move by Mozilla with FF2, and FF2 was god-awful.
As far as I can tell, all tech writers ARE cheering Chrome. It's just ordinary users who were underwhelmed by it, especially those who'd already been using Firefox. Perhaps if Chrome had been held a few more months until it was customizable (and therefore competitive), it might have made a larger splash.
Their browser is good too and as a Web Developer, they have the best analytics and webmaster tools out there.
Then there is Google Earth.
I think you are very uninformed regarding Google products and their popularity.
IE8 is the only browser that loads fast enough, in my opinion / measurements
Yours truly,
Goggle
Then everyone would stop using Google at the click of a mouse button.
Google is smarter than that.
As long as they have peopleīs trust people will use them.
Google is aware of this more than anyone else.
YEAH!!!!!!
I think putting FF at number one marketshare will only cause them to switch spots with IE.
Microsoft has ways of knowing how to innovate when they need to..
Keeping two browsers open works just fine.
- by queticomn June 29, 2009 4:40 PM PDT
- google is doing to the internet what m$ has done an is still doing.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(19 Comments)Die g$$gle.