Google have expanded their vision. They started off with a simple search box that simply found you whatever you were looking for. That google search page is just as simple today as the day they first launched in 1996.
What’s next?
If you are not going to put anything more on the webpage, you might as well take over the browser! Google released their own web-browser named Chrome yesterday and it gives us a few hints of the direction they are moving in.
- To get the obvious out of the way, the location bar is now just one big google search box.
- When you start the browser you can see thumbnails of your most popular websites.
But let’s stop there for a moment. We know that applications are moving online ‘to the cloud’. This is your new start bar.
- Google mail
- Basecamp project management
- Campfire chat
- Facebook contact management
- Twitter search
- Salesforce CRM
These applications are all just websites. If you click on the menu button on the right side of the screen you can see the item ‘create an application shortcut on a page’. This takes your website and creates a shortcut on your desktop. When you open it you are sent to a Chrome browser window straight to that application, with nothing but ‘chrome’ around the edges. As soon as you log in it asks to save your password to make it easier for you next time. If you are using these apps all day you don’t need the address bar, because you don’t use it when you are focussed on a single task. File downloads work really well too, with a simple bar appearing at the bottom of the window to show progress and give you a link to click which opens the file directly so there is no need to even know what folder the file is in.
Google have said they are putting a lot of effort in under the hood. For the guts of the browser they have started with Webkit – the same thing that Safari uses. Each tab has its own computing process, which makes a lot of sense if you treat each tab as a separate application. Web apps are built on javascript and they have rewritten their implementation from scratch, making it twice as fast.
But where are you?
Location is still a very young area for webbrowsers. The iPhone 3G has a GPS which knows where you are, but while you can use that information in an iPhone app you can’t yet pass it through the Safari browser. The opportunity is there though. The same goes for Chrome – Google have shown with Analytics that they can track you down to the city level so there is no technical reason they can’t integrate that with the web browser. Privacy is the real issue – it is a field full of landmines and while they can see the benefits, neither Apple or Google wants to be the first one to walk through and lose a leg.
The battle for the browser
There is obvious power in owning the portal through which we view the web. Google is strong already because they are the homepage and search engine of choice for so many people. The next step is owning the browser people use to go to the portal.
Earlier this year Apple made a grab for the browser market by launching Safari for PC. They bundled it with iTunes for distribution which was a huge move since so many PC users now have iPods and therefore iTunes, but that number still dwarfs the amount of people that use Google every day.
The handset in your palm
The next step past the browser is the device you are using it on. Apple are doing pretty well with the iPhone so far as the mobile carriers report that mobile data usage has exploded with the iPhone. Google have the Android operating system that they will start deploying later this year.
Google have a huge marketshare already. At least 80% of Australian searches are through Google. There is no doubt that they can get people to install their browser, so distribution isn’t so much of an issue. It is only their first week so we can’t judge much yet – but one thing is for sure, Google has just shown us some of the cards in their hand. Let’s see how they play them.
By Ross Hill - September 4th, 2008 at 11:14am with 1,469 views - android apple chrome google iphone safari
