WIRED:THE RUMOURS have been swirling for a while now but, on Monday, Google gave them some credence, in the bizarre form of a comic book sent to a few journalists.
The comic, written and drawn by the author of Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud, introduced the world to Google Chrome, Google's own open source web browser.
As I write this, the link listed in the comic - www.google.com/ chrome - does not actually point to anything, so one must presume either that there was a last-minute bug, or that Google had a pessimistic view of how fast non-internet mail travels now.
And while it feels a little odd extrapolating policy from a comic book, it's actually a rather good depiction of why Google thought it was worthwhile to dredge yet another product into the web browser market.
First, though, the story so far: everything you see or do on the web is mediated through one of a handful of software programs. Internet Explorer on Windows, Safari on the Mac are the "official" browsers of those two operating systems. A large minority of users download free alternatives, primarily Mozilla's Firefox and the Norwegian commercial browser, Opera. The usage share online worldwide is hard to quantify, but most agree that Explorer has around 80 per cent of the market, Firefox 16 per cent, Safari 3 per cent, and Opera under 1 per cent.
For many years, Explorer had over 90 per cent of the market. Back then there was a genuine concern that Microsoft's role as a gatekeeper to web content posed a real threat to the openness of the online world.
Companies like Google were seen as potentially at risk of Microsoft, for instance, deciding to place its own search service within the browser, or offering new features that other online companies could not access. Since the rise of Firefox and Safari, that fear has abated, somewhat: all browsers, including Explorer, now have to follow the same standards as their competitors, for fear of becoming incompatible with key websites.
Similarly, web designers are not tempted to use one company's proprietary extensions, out of a fear that other browser users will not be able to access their site.
In the early days of Firefox, Google was a key player in assuring its financial viability. Mozilla, the author of Firefox, was originally part of Netscape, which was bought by AOL. AOL spun off Mozilla as a separate company a few years into its development, but it was Google's decision to pay the company for providing links to its search engine that kept the project afloat. As Firefox became more popular, Mozilla's coffers filled, to the tune of some $50 million (€34.7 million) a year.
Small change, really, given the freedom that having an alternative browser provided for Google in terms of insulating it from potential Microsoft attacks. The search engine company has just renewed its contract to continue payments until 2011. So why introduce another browser?
What seems clear from its description is that this is less intended to be a direct competitor to Firefox, but more an exercise in rethinking the underlying engineering of the browser. Rather than being full of features, Chrome is the browser stripped to as minimal a role as it can have, bundled with enough power hidden behind it to run fairly complex web applications - such as Google's Gmail - fast and without crashing.
It's also open source, both in where it comes from, and where it's going. The origins of the renderer - the part of the browser that does the heavy lifting to present a web page as it is meant to look - lie in WebKit. WebKit was originally an open source created as part of a Linux desktop package: the code was adopted and included in Apple's Safari as part of open sources "share the code" philosophy.
Chrome's JavaScript interpreter - the other key element of a browser, which runs programs embedded within web pages - is a Google creation from its Danish development team. They say it is faster than other browsers, but they're making it open source, so that those other companies can include it in their products too.
With this kind of philosophy, it looks like Google Chrome's primary job is to shake up the market and improve browsers in general, rather than take on the giants of the browser world. Whatever Google does, it's viewed by consumers through the prism of their own browser software, which means if browsers run faster and are less buggy, then Google's own websites will look faster and cleaner, too.
It's not the first time Google has attempted to shake the tree it lives in: the company also recently took part in a $9 billion bidding war for radio spectrum, not to win, but to force the other bidders to agree to more openness. Google Chrome seems to be one of these attempts to increase the competition in the market for good browsers.
Google is often accused of arrogance, and perhaps Chrome reinforces that. However, the arrogance is not related to the companycoders' ability to create a market-beating browser, but to the fact they think they will do better in a more competitive market than they have done.
It takes a particular kind of self-belief in your business model to believe that.
