Chrome is not out to win the browser wars. Its out to change the game.

Posted by Paul Giurata

By now everyone has heard that Google has taken the wraps off of it's "GBrowser" project and released a public beta of Chrome. While many people speculate that Chrome is a rekindling of the browser wars, the reality is that Chrome is a move to accelerate the development of advanced Web applications, Cloud Computing and the SaaS market in particular.

Let's first acknowledge and then move beyond the "Google is reacting to XX" hypotheses:

1. Google is reacting to IE 8 - basically Google sees IE 8 as a threat to the open web and is releasing a browser that is secure, speedy and will adhere to web standards.
2. Google is reacting to Adobe Flex/Air - Adobe has been trying to position Flex as a more capable replacement for AJAX and Java. The Chrome browser promises uber-competitiveness with  AJAX super-responsiveness and it's own Air-like solutions. Moreover it uses open standards so it ends up leaving Flex and Air to be proprietary also-rans.

These are both very reasonable rationales for Chrome. But I believe Chrome is actually an aggressive/offensive and strategic move by Google to speed broader adoption of SaaS and Cloud Computing.

Chrome feature set is geared toward Web apps

Here are some of the more relevant Chrome technical specs:

• Web applications/sites run in tabs as their own process and can run in parallel (like modern desktop apps)
• New multi-threaded (i.e. process several JavaScripts at once) and fast (compiled) V8 JavaScript engine designed to run full applications rather than just tiny widgets
• Each tab is sandboxed so it is more secure and crash-resistant (e.g. a problem in one tab/web application won't bring down the whole browser)
• Gears toolkit, included in Chrome, lets developers create applications that can be used offline, synching data with the Web when an Internet connection is available - blurring the line between Web-based applications and desktop applications
• Designed with WebKit (same as used in Android Mobile OS, Safari on desktops and iPhone, Adobe Air, and several Nokia phones) so it is desktop and mobile savvy
• Memory management, garbage collection, etc.

An engine to speed broader adoption of SaaS and Cloud Computing

Essentially Google is upping the performance, security, stability, and sophistication ante. The ultimate goal of Chrome isn't to be a standard web browser, or as some have speculated, a Web operating system. Rather it is intended to be an engine for the next generation of enterprise Web applications.

Chrome will not displace IE or FireFox as a browser for displaying pages - most consumers cannot even be bothered with updating from IE 6 to IE 7, let alone downloading a new browser to read their favorite blogs! But for Google the browser has been the weak link between the user and it's powerful data centers. By retooling with Chrome, they create a multi-tasking web application engine for professional users, that can make Web apps virtually indistinguishable from desktop apps. And it can also do double duty as your everyday browser.

The lure of web applications that are high performance, cross-platform, cross-device, and secure (process separation and filters for malware) will be sufficient to move many more corporate or SMB applications "into the cloud". And since Chrome is still using JavaScript, applications developed with Chrome in mind, will still perform well with "traditional" browsers.

Google is not alone

I should point out that Google is not alone in this move to high performance JavaScript. Apple is upgrading WebKit with the SquirrelFish bytecode JavaScript interpreter. FireFox 3.1 will incorporate the Tamarin JIT-compiling JavaScript virtual machine. Both will increase JavaScript performance by an order of magnitude to enable complex applications that were previously impractical over the web. With Chrome available as open source, I would not be surprised to see both Apple, FireFox and even IE, embrace and extend Chrome capabilities into their own platforms.

Regardless of Chrome's ultimate market penetration, the release signals a compelling shift away from thinking about the Web as a collection of pages, to a cloud platform for running enterprise-level web applications and SaaS.