Generally, I'm critical of new entries into the browser market. It's not that I don't support competition so much that until we get our standards organizations (namely, the W3C) to run more efficiently, adding more clients is only going to contribute to the madness.
Additionally, I'm rarely impressed by anything Google does; while their initial search engine was an effective step forward, their only real product remains AdWords. Outside of that their offerings are mostly rehashed and overly-simplified copies of other web service providers (Yahoo!, Live.com, etc) - putting them in the same rut that Yahoo! fell into before Google demoted them to second-fiddle. Ask.com, for example, provides some really innovative features for drilling down on (or expanding) queries by cross-referencing related keywords. Live.com's image search provides a clever application of AJAX that, beyond eye candy, is far more practical for finding images. Meanwhile, the creator of Wikipedia is promising a search engine that allows content to be organized, prioritized and annotated to provide subjective editorial rankings well beyond the capabilities of Google's PageRank.
Given these biases, I'm an unlikely candidate to embrace Google's entry into the browser market. Nonetheless, I'm both impressed by and excited about Google Chrome.
First, Google has chosen to maintain consistency primarily with the Safari/Konqueror interpretation of the standards. The keyword here is interpretation. While organizations like Firefox give a lot of lip service to the term "Standard" the fact is that web standards are years behind the technology, confusing in their documentation and often times ambiguous in their direction. As a result, two browsers could be completely standards compliant and render the same markup significantly differently. By choosing to honor interpretations by (or borrow from) competitors, Google is helping reinforce the one true web standard: browser vendor agreement. (Ironically, Safari has demonstrated an interpretation more synchronized with Internet Explorer 7.0 than Firefox - but that's another discussion).
Second, Google shows a lot of promise in pushing web standards forward. Looking back, Firefox has been a largely reactive force in the web standards market; while they've really pushed the role of the browser as a user interface (in terms of plug-ins, themes) the browser has done little to expand web standards. This is not surprising; their primary claim is standards-compliance and the W3C is a slow moving beast. In fact, it's arguable that being standards compliant is intrinsically at odds with being innovative when it come to interpreting and expanding web content. Google, on the other hand, is in very much the same position as Microsoft in the late nineties (IE3, 4, 5) and Netscape before that (NS1, 2). Since Google's primary business and interest is writing web applications, they are very familiar with the limitations of the standards and other browsers and thus have a vested interest in pushing the technology. However, unlike Microsoft's contributions (ActiveX, CSS script, Behaviors, Html Applications, Filters, etc) Google has more clout in pushing through standards. I don't think this is because Google's standards are intrinsically better than Microsoft's so much that Google comes from a similar technological philosophy as other members of the W3C and, thus, is more likely to gain traction - where Microsoft introduced style disagreements even down to the identifier level. (A good example of this is Microsoft's constant attempt to "map" web naming conventions, such as CSS attributes, to Microsoft conventions in products like ASP.NET and even their AJAX libraries - something which causes more confusion than benefit).
There were some real surprises apparent immediately after installing Google Chrome. First and foremost, right off the bat it tells you that Google is the default search provider - and prompts you for the opportunity to change this. Given that Google's primary business is search this is surprising - and a huge change in direction from the old Microsoft and Netscape battles over default home page (which still rages on with Firefox). While this is, admittedly, a touch insincere (Google knows that users installing Chrome are likely fans of Google search) it's still a pleasant gesture.
Additionally, I was surprised to see how much the user interface borrowed from Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0; it feels way, way, way more like IE7 than it does Firefox. Personally, I'm quite a fan of IE7's UI which makes it my browser of choice; much of this is purely cosmetic, but nonetheless it feels solid. I've heard a lot of criticisms of IE7's interface (just as I have of Vista) and so it'll be curious to see what the public response to Chrome is. How much of these complaints are genuinely against Internet Explorer and how many are just against Microsoft? Or perhaps, aesthetics aside, there are more subtle usability issues that Google address?
Since Chrome doesn't yet support Adobe Flash (or Microsoft Silverlight, for that matter) - or, perhaps, vice versa - it's impractical to use as my primary browser of choice. Nonetheless, I think the beta is a strong contender in the market and while I don't think it is particularly innovative I do think it's a nice consolidation of best practices from across the browser market. Most importantly, though, I think that Google (despite all of their faults) will be an incredibly valuable player in the standards market. If anyone is able to achieve an urgency to progress, I think Google is best positioned.
tags: Google, Chrome, Browsers, Standards, Web