JoshHolden.net

Well holy jebus.  Google today announced they’ll be releasing their own web browser named “Chrome”.  Now the browser war really gets interesting.  

I’ve been wondering how long it would take Google to enter the browser market.  For so long it’s been playing nice with mozilla and encouraging firefox adoption.

Pushing firefox is all well and good.  It’s a great browser run by a great foundation.  But that’s just it, it’s run by a foundation controlled by another group.  Not Google.  

As Google continues to grow its reach into web services for businesses (Google Apps) and consumers (gmail, search, GChat, etc, etc…), it needs something to grab onto.  An anchor residing on the users computer that can run their cloud-based web apps quickly and efficiently.  

Until they made this step, their ability to extend their apps into offline enabled systems was dependent on 3rd party support.  

My guess is Google’s original intention was to stay the course with this partnership and the development of Google Gears (Google’s firefox extension that allowed for offline functionality for apps like GMail, and Google Calendar, etc).  But, users just weren’t adopting/downloading Gears.  

Ddepending on users to download and install an application isn’t the best of positions.  It requires too much thought on the users part, particularly when the live, online version works just fine. 

I would also guess Google was trying to get Mozilla to pre-install Gears in Firefox.  Do you think that turned out the way they wanted?  hmmm, maybe not. 

All-in-all I say: Bravo Google.  Great business move.  But, I have one concern.  This may hurt firefox more than it will IE.  Only time will tell.