Wow. Yesterday, Google unleashed a fall surprise in the form of a desktop application for Windows that instantly rekindled the web browser wars of yore. In the Nineties, the browser battle between IE and Netscape felt like a heavy weight boxing match. This time around, the fight between IE, Firefox, Safari, and now Google Chrome, is going to be more like watching mixed martial arts mayhem in the octagon cage.
Make no mistake, Chrome is a serious contender in this arena. This quickly became obvious to us yesterday as we tested out the browser on many of our favorite web sites and applications. Chrome is blazingly fast for reasons we won’t detail here, but just know that it was designed specifically for web 2.0 type applications that make heavy use of javascript. The browser speed is gained through more efficient memory management and a new javascript processor called V8, both of which could vastly improve the iPhone web experience. Will we ever see Google Chrome in the App Store? Unlikely. However, there is hope that we will get some Chrome on our iPhones in the near future.
Before we ruminate the prospects of Chrome on the iPhone, we need to explain why this is such a big deal in the first place. Chrome sets the stage for Google to integrate all of its web applications onto the user’s desktop through a doorway that is controlled by Google. This is a massively bold and strategic move by Google, as if they sent their rook out into the open to put the enemy in check. This truly positions the web as an operating system, the holy grail that browser makers have sought for many years, beginning with Netscape back in the day and still pursued by the hopelessly optimistic Microsoft. Google Chrome is currently Windows-only (XP and Vista) but will soon be available on Mac and Linux.
In a single stroke, two years in the making, Google appears to have snatched the grail away from Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla all at once. Business strategy and CEO egos aside, Apple maintains a firm grip on the iPhone user experience purely for quality control, and therefore won’t unseat mobile Safari by offering Chrome a spot in the App Store. However, Google could release a mobile version of Chrome for jailbroken iPhones giving those users a faster web experience.
But the real question remains, will iPhone users even want Chrome? Google’s terms and conditions for Chrome are pretty nefarious for the “do no evil” company. Read for yourself…
By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.
This language is very similar to the legalese in the original T’s and C’s for Google Docs which Google later edited to be more friendly. We expect the same to happen for Chrome if Google wants to gain any trust in the market place. Would you trust Google enough to use Chrome even though the web experience is faster? Don’t forget, they are in the business of collecting information about you so they can target ads to you.
You can be sure to see a mobile version of Chrome running on Google Android, the mobile operating system due later this year, but where does that leave the iPhone? Google has released Chrome under an open source license which means it’s more likely that hackers will release a version for jailbroken iPhones before Google does.
This is great for jailbreakers, but what about legit iPhones? Apple could conceivably integrate V8 into mobile Safari, a highly probably scenario given that Chrome was built using Apple’s Webkit rendering engine (the same one used by Safari) and V8 was released under the GPL open source license. Of course, Apple could also reverse engineer V8 to improve upon SquirrelFish, the javascript processor they have been working on for Safari. Either way, we could soon see a little Chrome on our iPhones and iPod touches delivering a faster, more reliable web experience.
It probably doesn’t matter much to Google how users get to their web apps, whether it be IE, Firefox, or Safari, as long as the browser takes advantage of the underlying open source technology enabling Chrome. After all, a faster web experience on any browser means more people using Google web applications.
UPDATE 8/3/2008
Well, that was fast. Google is responding to the public outcry by Touchtip and other web sites over that creepy big brother language in Chrome’s terms and conditions (EULA). Ars Technica has the details.
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