Fred Cirera

The good and the bad coming from the new web browser from Google.

According to this quote from Reuters.

“We have borrowed good ideas from others,” Google Vice President of Product Management Sindar Pichai said. “Our goal here was to bring our point of view, but do it in a very open way.”

Because Chrome relies on Apple’s open-source WebKit software for rendering Web pages, it can run any application that runs on Apple’s Safari Web browser, Pichai said.

“If you are a Webmaster, and your site works in Apple Safari then it will work very well in Google Chrome,” he said.

All this means is that there is no technology breakthrough in Chrome. The rendering engine is based on WebKit which is itself based on KDE‘s Konquerer. The only thing Google Chrome does differently is one process per tab. The overhead should be more important than in an all multi-threaded program. For people who open a lots of tabs Chrome will need more memory to run than Firefox for example.

With the high visibility of Google, the number of users running a WebKit browser will increase. This will force developers to test their sites not only with IE and Firefox but also with a WebKit-based browser. Ultimately, developers will prefer standard HTML and Javascript over the specificity of a browser over an another. If they don’t want to lose significant traffic, they will need to stick to standards. Standards are good for users, Apple, Linux, and Opera.

There is one thing I have doubts about. Google doesn’t seems to care much about your privacy¹. (Ok they claim they do). Their goal is to collect a maximum of information about you, to show you more targeted ads. Some may think it is good but, with the search engine, adsense, checkout, doubleclick, and now the browser, Google is collecting a lot of information about user behavior. I really hope for us that they will not use all this information for evil.

¹ Why does Google remember information about searches?, Google Toolbar Privacy Notice