September 2nd, 2008
Google Chrome is complementary to Firefox
The media is going to be all over the Google Chrome story today, painting it as a threat to or rejection of Firefox.
While it’s true Google pulled its developers off Firefox in 2006, the resulting code is open source.
Google felt it had to go to a clean sheet of paper in order to deal with key problems and take advantage of its own infrastructure in development.
As the now famous comic book describes it, Chrome is aimed at solving key problems with current browser design — single-threading, inefficient rendering engines, incomplete garbage collection — that slow you down once you put up a bunch of tabs.
I do it all the time with Firefox. Working on a story like this one I may have a dozen or more tabs open, building an array of sources I can then cut-and-paste as links in a story.
This can easily crash Firefox. If one tab has corrupt code the whole browser is hung-up. And it slows Firefox down, because a tab’s memory isn’t entirely cleared out when you close it.
Chrome is based on open source technologies like Webkit and Javascript, so it’s not a “corporate capture” of the Internet. It can’t be. If Mozilla likes aspects of it, Mozilla can adapt them. The comic explicitly endorses Mozilla’s capture of the V8 Javascript engine, for instance.
In the end this isn’t about Microsoft or Mozilla or Google at all, but the Web and Web developers. Chrome is designed for a more complex development environment, and a more sophisticated user base.
Over the last few years it has become obvious that, given Google’s size, it would “take over” any project it contributed to. The Chrome project is an explicit acknowledgement of that reality.
But it’s not a threat to open source. It is open source. I am really looking forward to trying Chrome, because if it fulfills all its promises it’s going to be a very good thing.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
| 09/02/08
