14 DAY TRIAL // On September 2, 2008 Google released its own breed of open source browser, a marriage between Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox, dubbed Google Chrome. Of course, Google Chrome is first and foremost a new competitor for Internet Explorer on the browser market. But in Google's own perspective, it is so much more than a potential IE killer. It is actually a Windows killer. Google has in fact not been shy about positioning Chrome against both Internet Explorer and Windows, as items of prey.
"What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build," revealed Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, and Linus Upson engineering director, on the occasion of the first official announcement of Google Chrome.
With the exception of the platform reference from Pichai and Upson, Google was careful to avoid the subject. Of course, not all of the Mountain View-based search giant representatives followed suit. Google co-founder Sergey Brin in fact indicated that Chrome was gunning down for Windows, not only Internet Explorer.
"I think operating systems are kind of an old way to think of the world," Brin stated according to Yahoo Finance. "They have become kind of bulky, they have to do lots and lots of different legacy things. Web users want a very lightweight, fast engine for running applications. The kind of things you want to have running standalone on a computer are shrinking."
Since Google's portfolio of services is situated completely into the cloud, the Mountain View-company needs only a browser to let end users access its products. In this context, the only actual piece of software anchored on the desktop that Google needs to control is the browser. The operating system in general, and Windows in particular, although it is currently one of the main intermediaries controlling access to Google along with IE, can be circumvented completely. In this context a future where the Google Chrome browser would boot straight on top of the hardware, perhaps with a minimalist hypervisor layer at the basis, but no Windows, or any operating system in sight, is a threat that Microsoft can not afford to ignore.
"We believe that open source works not only because it allows people to join us and improve our products, but also (and more importantly) because it means other projects are able to use the code we've developed. Where we've developed innovative new technology, we hope that other projects can use it to make their products better, just as we've been able to adopt code from other open source projects to make our product better," revealed Ben Goodger, Google software engineer.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is available for download here.
Google Chrome is available for download here.