Monday, September 08, 2008
Google Announces Chrome: The Pundits React
byLast week, Google announced Chrome, a new browser based on WebKit, the open source Web engine that powers Apple’s Safari and iPhone. Chrome will either be a game changing addition to the browser wars, or another niche product such as Opera or OmniWeb. If nothing else, Google has set the blogosphere abuzz. Here are some of my favorite quotes:
Windows proponent Paul Thurrott comes right out and says what Google apparently didn’t want to admit:
While the company was very careful yesterday never to explicitly mention Microsoft, Google is in fact very much aware that Chrome is reigniting an old debate, started in the mid-1990s days of Netscape--that the browser could replace Windows.
JavaScript expert Alex Russell put Chrome into context, or more precisely, in its place:
To get real, honest-to-god leverage out of this process, Chrome is going to need something like 60+% market share, and that means changing ingrained user habits. I put the probability of that happening without distribution channel love at roughly bupkis.
John Resig, creator of the jQuery client-side library, has a warning for Web developers:
The blame of bad performance or memory consumption no longer lies with the browser but with the site. By implementing [Chrome’s process manager] feature a browser is completely deflecting all memory or performance criticism off to individual site owners ("Yikes, my browser is using 300MB of memory! Actually it’s just youtube.com consuming 290MB of it, they should fix their web site!"). This is going to be a monumental shift in the responsibilities of web developers - and one that will serve the web better, as a whole.
And finally, Mac technology expert John Siracusa sums it up nicely with high praise for Google’s audacity:
That’s what’s most exciting about Chrome: not the individual features Google has added, not the most prominent aspects of its user interface, such as the top-mounted tabs. All of that stuff will be tried and tested in the market. But the approach, the philosophy, the sheer chutzpah on display...that is a thing of beauty.
