GigaOM

Over on OStatic, Sam Dean has put Google’s open-source Chrome browser (available for Windows users), through the paces. Deeming it “clean and complete for a beta version,” Dean dishes up an in-depth review:

• As promised, Chrome is focused on web applications and is tricked out to handle them nicely. While it may not be ready to act as a complete OS just yet, it lets you create shortcuts for your favorite web apps and run them — even if Chrome is closed.
• Like lots of Google products, Chrome is watching — and it tallies and collects the web sites you visit most often in the Most Visited page (tab). So far, its a useful tool, but it could also host some Google self-promotion.
• Google is making a big deal of Chrome’s “one box for everything” approach. Google search box, address bar, toolbar — Chrome offers it all as one-stop shopping, without menus or multiple places to enter text.
• For the tabbed browsing maniac or the cloud-computing convert, Chrome lets you work with many open tabs at once without crashing or causing rendering problems.
• Chrome isn’t clearly a Firefox friend or foe, just yet. Google acknowledges that it’s borrowed heavily from Firefox’s code, and Chrome readily imports bookmarks and settings. That relationship could also mean extensions designed for Firefox can quickly migrate to the new browser.
• Extensions could be a critical weakness. Google doesn’t have a great track record for bringing out the community to participate in its projects, and without the extensive plug-in catalog that Firefox has collected, Chrome won’t displace it.

Read more at Ostatic. Get a second opinion at Web Worker Daily.

It was nearly a decade ago when a then-young Marc Andreessen, the wunderboy founder of Netscape Communications, first talked about the concept of the browser pushing the operating system into the background. With the release of Google’s experimental browser, Chrome, we have come full circle.

A lot has changed in the past 10 years. For one thing, the cost of hardware and network infrastructure has declined sharply. Such a decline has led to what’s known as cloud computing, whereby companies like Amazon offer infrastructure on demand. That has, in turn, allowed innovators to roll out their applications without making major outlays up front.

In the meantime, always-on broadband connections at home, work, and while on the move have become commonplace. This has served as a catalyst for innovators, who have developed web services that are now screaming for browsers that allow your data to live on the web but be accessible offline, a trend I first wrote about out in a column for the now-defunct Business 2.0 magazine back in March of 2006.

As I noted back then…

“Things will get more exciting for entrepreneurs when we all start walking around with new Internet-ready portable devices…these pocket-size monsters with keyboards, luscious displays, and brisk 3G connections will soon replace laptops…all they need are browsers that can access Web-based software as easily as your desktop can.”

For web applications, the bigger and more real opportunity is with an emerging category of Internet-enabled devices optimized for on-the-go computing. They are skimpy on resources, but they all have browsers. And given app developers’ focus on designing apps that can be made available to millions simultaneously, the browser has taken a much more prominent role in our digital life compared to the operating system.

Alistair Croll put it best when he wrote:

“Browsers have made computers interchangeable; most of us can work on whatever machine we have at hand, be it a PC, Mac or an XO laptop. As a result, the browser is the new desktop. Today’s browser competition is less about who renders HTML properly, and more about what the incumbent browser is and how well it accommodates whatever new applications the Internet throws its way.”

But in order for web applications to match the desktop applications they seek to replace, these browsers need to start offering OS-like functionality. While this year has brought some changes in that direction, Google’s Chrome browser embodies such an approach as it is specifically built for these web applications.

“We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build,” Sundar Pichai, VP of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director, write on the Google blog.

One of the biggest improvements on this browser is the V8 JavaScript Virtual Machine, which allows multithreading and is said to be more stable than the current implementations of JavaScript. It enables the easy use of multiple web applications without slowing down the browser.

Google Chrome has faster JavaScript VM, better memory management, better Windows UI rendering, faster text layout and rendering,  and intelligent page navigation in comparison to other more widely adopted browsers. When combined with Google Gears technology, this is as close as you can get to replicating the desktop experience with web applications. “While we wanted to make more choices for users, we wanted to make less headaches for developers,” Pichai said in a demo of Chrome at the Google HQ on Tuesday. Chrome could act as the operating layer for cloud computers — and could turn out to be the netbook browser of choice.

“No, I would not call Chrome the operating system of web apps,” said Google co-founder Sergey Brin at the Tuesday demo. “I think it is a very fast engine to run web apps.

“With Chrome we will be able to bridge the divide; we will be able do more and more online,” he said. “You will be able to access your work from an Internet cafe and get all those benefits.”

Microsoft with its IE 8, Mozilla Firefox with its new technology efforts such as Prism and TraceMonkey, and Apple’s Safari are also moving to make their browsers work better with web-based services and applications.

No matter how you look at it, we’ve gone back to the future. And while the browser is not quite the OS yet, its relevance in our digital lives has become paramount.

With additional reporting from Liz Gannes

Today the Wall Street Journal drills into another aspect of the maturing broadband market: price wars. But instead of being good for consumers, in the end these may actually end up hurting them — by enticing them into capped services from cable providers or tying them to plans with early termination fees.

With fewer new customers signing up with DSL or cable providers, we’ve tracked the side effects of maturity such as negative advertising and the boosts in speed offered to prospective customers. To illustrate the expected price wars, the WSJ cites price cuts from Verizon and pricing guarantees from AT&T, the nation’s two largest DSL providers, and assumes cable companies will respond. The cable guys had pretty much won the war when it came to attracting new broadband subscribers, partly because they can advertise faster speeds, and because the newer high-speed services from the phone companies are cannibalizing DSL sales.

This is a price war that will be played out among the average user of “garden variety broadband services,” as the WSJ calls it. My guess is these are the folks using what Comcast cites as the average 2 GB or 3 GB per month, rather than those of you taking the 250 GB challenge in response to the caps some cable companies are implementing on their user base. In Time Warner’s case, the caps will likely benefit from price wars as a way to sign up customers under the new capped plans for lower prices. I noticed Verizon’s offer also contains an early termination fee. Both of which mean that in this price war, some consumers will lose.

image courtesy of Verizon

Symbian has released data for the first half of the year and the second quarter of 2008 that shows it has met the iPhone challenge and is still on top. That’s what happens when you have 159 devices shipping with your operating system and are a mainstay OS for Nokia, which has captured 39.5 percent of the handset market.

During the second quarter, Symbian launched on 19.6 million devices, up just 5 percent from 18.7 million for the same period the year before. From April to June 2008, Apple said it sold 717,000 iPhones up from 270,000 in the same period in 2007 for growth of 166 percent. Awesome growth, but it’s easy to grow from nothing (the iPhone launched in June 2007), and the overall market share for the iPhone and its OS is still tiny. Especially  if you recall that Gartner estimated that 304.7 million phones shipped during the second quarter, giving Symbian a 6.4 percent market share and the iPhone OS a 0.2 percent share.

Symbian also reported that it had 92 phone models in development (the highest ever achieved), an increase of 48 percent on the 62 models in development during Q2 2007. But revenue from royalties in the second quarter of 2008 were down to $3.4 million from $4.3 million for the same period in 2007, as Symbian strives to adapt to a more dynamic environment for mobile operating systems by shifting its royalty fees.

Without a highly publicized App Store, the 9,834 applications developed for the Symbian OS (up 25 percent from the second quarter of 2007), aren’t getting the attention the more than 2,500 iPhone applications receive, but they are still growing at a good clip. The iPhone may get many of the headlines, but Symbian isn’t crying uncle yet.

Ben Verwaayen, former CEO of BT Group, is coming home — so to speak. He is going to replace Alcatel-Lucent CEO Patricia Russo and Chairman Serge Tchuruk. The Franco-American company has proved to be a corporate mismatch that makes the unlikely pairing of Kid Rock & Pamela Anderson seem normal (Hat-tip: Jesse Kopelman). The news was reported by the Wall Street Journal. Philippe Camus, a French executive, will be the new chairman of the Franco-American telecom maker and will be based in New York. Verwaayen, on the other hand, will be based in Paris.

Continue Reading

In response to today’s news that Google is releasing its own browser, code-named Chrome, I decide to call John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corp., the folks behind the fast-growing Firefox browser. My intention was to find out what Lilly thought about this development, especially since Mozilla has been viewed as close personal partner of Google’s.

The open-source browser maker depends heavily on a lucrative financial deal it has signed with the search company. The pair recently renewed the deal to last through 2011. Was Lilly worried about yet another browser in the market?

After all, the emergence of Linux has had an equally deflationary impact on the UNIX market. Can a Google browser, promoted on Google homepage and pushed through Google’s mobile OS, become a sticky wicket for Mozilla Firefox?

Continue Reading