Impact of Google Chrome Browser

Earlier this week, Google released the beta of their Chrome Browser, the browser wars have gone quite for while now and Chrome has rekindled it. Now the questions on everyone's mind are - what will be the impact of Googles Chrome browser? And why Google has released their own browser?

At first glance its seems that Google released Chrome just to get a slice of the browser market - No prize for guessing that Microsofts Internet Explorer will be impacted by Chrome, and Google vs. Microsoft rivalry is seen as the reason for Google releasing Chrome. IE may take a hit but keep in mind that Googles Chrome could take the steam away from FireFox, many of the FireFox user base would predictably move to Chrome. Chances are that even before Microsoft sees IE usage going down, FireFox usage might start dwindling.

So Chrome is set to disrupt the browser market share. Is that all? Hardly, the bigger picture is that Microsoft stands to lose much more that just the browser market share, the biggest jolt to Microsoft IMO, would be to their Software+Service (S+S) strategy. Microsoft Software+Service (S+S) strategy differs from SaaS cause Microsoft is promoting a rich client into the picture vs. SaaS which is primarily viewed as a browser only approach. Microsofts rational behind the rich client so far has been that you could not develop rich web applications (particularly business apps) using a browser only approach, and Microsoft is correct, if you had ever made an web application that extensively leveraged AJAX you would agree with Microsoft - your app would behave sluggish in both IE and FireFox. Microsoft continues to dominate the market with their desktop model and continue to promote their Software+Service model . Someone has a problem with this - that someone is Google. Google in the past has been trying to demonstrate that AJAX can be used to build very rich browser applications (such as Google Docs) and they have even built solutions like Google Gears etc to demonstrate that the pure browser rich application is very much possible. But these attempts from Google have fallen short of their expected goals - the culprit is - JavaScript . Actually it’s the implementation of JavaScript in the various browsers. Both IE 8 and FireFox have pledged to support faster JavaScript execution but Google had taken a different approach with Chrome: there is a JavaScript specific virtual machine(V8) in Chrome that manages JavaScript objects, memory and garbage collection. Chromes approach is vastly superior to how JavaScript is being managed by the other browsers like IE and FireFox. Chrome should be able to support very heavy AJAX driven application. Companies who have been shying away from building very rich browser centric application/ companies that have gone the S+S route would now look upto Chrome for a better experience and in process turn away from S+S. Thats not a good story for Microsoft.

Vendors like Adobe (with Flash, AIR) and Microsoft (with SilverLight, S+S) understand that you need to think outside the basic browser (DHTML) to build rich application, but Google is tackling the challenge from a different direction. How far can Google get with Chrome and how big a dent can Chrome make?

Big I would imagine.