Google Chrome

Google released its own web browser, named Chrome, yesterday, and many blog posts have already been dedicated to it.

I agree with Martin McKeay's judgement: "So what?" The browser seems to have some interesting ideas, but it does not warrant switching over it. I'm not sure if Google is trying to make a serious attempt at getting into the desktop browser market, or if they want to use the product to push the envelope of technology by demonstrating that certain enhancements are possible in production-quality code.

The fact that Chrome installs (and runs) on Windows without administrator privileges is interesting though. Another thing that we have to remember is that Google will probably package it with their bundle. Basically, anyone downloading Picasa or Google Earth will probably end up with a copy on their system. Even if they never use that, it is yet another source of potentially insecure code.

We'll see; I haven't seen anything that would prompt me to go in and switch my default browser to Chrome. I'll use it to see if a page renders properly when I'm testing something, but I also do that with IE, FF, Konqueror, Opera, Safari, etc.

I'm not entirely sure that Google's strategy is for this. I agree with the observation made in Martin's podcast: this will probably take away from Firefox's market share much more than it will take away from IE (if any effect can be seen at all)