Now available for over half a year, Google's Browser Chrome has already reached version 4.

What is interesting about Google Chrome, and why does Google offer such a product?

Apart from its main offering - search - Google offers quite some online applications, most prominently maps, mail, calendar and office. All of these applications use the latest web technologies bases on the now called AJAX.
Google was even one of the first to employ these technologies, which enable a website to dynamically react to user input and to - on demand - reload content.

So - make no mistake - Google couln't care less which browser you use to access their online application suite -

as long as it runs them --- well.

And here lies the problem. Ajax is quite a new technology, not yet widely in use. As such, browser support might be incomplete or not providing adequate performance.

But for all those nice and shiny Google apps to work, the browser has to provide a good execution environment for them. Not being content with what the market now provides, Google created Chrome first and foremost as a reference platform.
The worst thing it could do would be to alter its apps to only run (well) on its own browser1. Obviously Google wants to spur competition so that (ideally) every browser will get better. (And in turn run Google apps better). Those guys are no idiots. Chrome is just a means to an end. They have the bigger picture in mind.

Now think for a second --- why did Microsoft crush Netscape in the first browser war.

Exactly... they wanted to prevent precisely that from happening.

Wartime Report

The Second browser war - now 'raging' - is a cold war. The winner of the first war is firmly entrenched and has rested on its laurels for far too long. In the meantime, the old contender slowly rose from the ashes. But only after he was spurred by another contender on a seemingly minor battlefield, pulled itself together and became what he is by now.

And now Google takes the small contender from the seemingly minor battlefield onto the big battlefield to tout the two opposing parties.

Interestingly this small contender, born among a community of rebels, nourished by an old warrior declared dead uncounted times, managed to conquer a quite peculiar and nearly uncontested battlefield up to this day.

Let's see if the war gets hot again.

p.s. Who knows what parties and what battlefields are involved? Where would you file Chrome OS?

  1. guess who does ↩