Google Browser Launches

September 2nd, 2008

Google’s official blog announced the release of “Google Chrome.” The browser will be open source and probably set-up much like Firefox. Google claims it is not doing this to compete but to help foster innovation. That seems to be true (to a certain degree) as Google has invested a lot of money in Firefox.

However, while they may not want to compete with good partners such as Apple and Mozilla…it is clear they are going directly for the jugular with Microsoft. Allow me to explain. The web browser will become the ultimate operating system of the future as most companies move towards web based systems rather than software based systems. Think Salesforce vs ACT. The web based systems are slowly making software based platforms obsolete. As this happens and more data is moved from the desktop to “the web cloud” the browser becomes a tremendously more important part of the computing environment. Microsoft may have won the first big browser war when they beat out AOL and Netscape but they are in big trouble if they lose this war.

UPDATE:

CNN has a great review of the browser here