One of the worst kept secrets in search is Google’s encompassing desire to damage or even deep-six Microsoft. Google has taken a leading role in leading computer users into the clouds. By fundamentally altering the tools available to computer users, Google has established itself as the most dangerous adversary Microsoft has ever faced. Yesterday morning, while North Americans woke to a lazy third day of a summer-ending long weekend, Google released the third pillar of its plan to either become or bury Microsoft. The news came in the form of a 38-page comic book.

Google has announced the release of its new web browser, Google Chrome. The beta version is available for download at Google.com and will be available at over 100 country-specific versions of Google by tomorrow.
The announcement came as a bit of a surprise however most observers were not shocked to read it. The development of a Google web browser has been a long simmering and often denied rumor in the search and IT communities. Google has good reasons for keeping their development cycles as secret as possible.

Google has much greater plans behind the release of Chrome, plans that saw first light four years ago with the release of Gmail. Three years ago, Google released Google Docs. Today, Google released a web browser. Google’s stable of products are clearly undermining Microsoft’s strongest foundations. As time moves forward and computing becomes a far more personal experience, Google expects to isolate Microsoft through faster and greater innovation. Something to keep in mind… Google Chrome is designed for the future. What we see today is merely the beta.

Google is designing products to serve far smaller computing devices. The key element to all Google applications, including search, is that very little of the actual software powering those applications or data generated by those applications resides on users’ computers. All the processing and storage our massive desktops were designed to do is performed at the server level, way up in the clouds.

In a very short time from now, your cell phone could be your main computing device. Watch for news on an open source mobile development protocol called Android. That’s where the fourth keystroke will fall.

About Chrome Itself…

Google Chrome (which really needs to be rebranded Gbrowser) is pretty cool. According to the Official Google Blog, the development team that designed Chrome took the best features of other web browsers and innovated on them.

“We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others — and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.”

Chrome has the sparse Googely look, loads pages very quickly and features several intuitive search and navigation aids. Some of those navigational aids interact with the Google database. For instance, Chrome uses Google’s search database to pre-load potential URLs or search queries in the address bar.

Chrome also keeps track of browser use history with a default opening page that shows a user’s most frequently and recently visited websites. Google’s ability to track search history and augment an individual’s unique search experience raises several privacy concerns, many of which are faced head-on by Matt Cutts in his blog post today, “Preventing paranoia: when does Google Chrome talk to Google.com?””

One of the issues Matt covers is how Chrome treats documents differently than other browsers do. Chrome interfaces with Google.com in order to improve loading times and, in some cases, push experience. The example in Matt’s post involves 404-pages, that pesky error code that tells a file or document requested is not found on a server. Most 404-pages served are actually default templates found in IE or Firefox. Too few webmasters take the time to create custom designed (and helpful) 404-pages. When Chrome encounters a 404-error, it checks to see if the 404-page served is useful to the browser user. If it decides that page is NOT as useful as it could be, Chrome scans Google’s database to find and implant suggestions. Matt assures his readers that the features in Chrome that pique the interests of privacy advocates can easily be turned off.

Google’s browser uses tabs like Firefox and later versions of IE do but the Chrome claims to treats those tabs as separate processes in order to save overall processing power. Firefox users will be familiar with how their computers seem to bog down towards the end of the day. That’s because Firefox prioritizes all tabs as one session with each tab sharing the processing power allocated to the overall browser. Chrome’s architecture deletes each tab-session when the tab is closed, even if the browser itself remains open.  When discussing this design feature over a break at the shop, one of Metamend’s technical SEO specialists, Colin Cochrane, pointed out that IE8 makes a similar claim in a March 11/08 post at the IEBlog titled, “IE8 and Loosely-Coupled IE (LCIE)”.  The point is; good browser architecture makes computing experiences faster by requiring less allocated memory.

Chrome still has a number of areas to improve on but for a first release it is a good product. It has thus far failed to execute Java commands but that issue might be solved by simply restarting my computer. Users will need to take a few sessions to get used to its far sparser interface. There are no text-menu items and Chrome doesn’t appear to want to load any toolbars, including Google’s.

This is the first public version of the Google Web Browser and, like all Google products, will likely be kept in beta for a while. The browser is the most important interface on a computer right now though. As the Google Chrome team wrote, most of us, “… spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends — all using a browser.” We even email and post to our blogs from the browser.

In Google’s new world, the browser is the desktop and the Internet combined with Android is the OS.  Rest well Microsoft.