The Gleam Of Chrome

Chris Messina has said some of the things I have been muttering this week, since the Chrome announcement by Google, including the manifestoness of Scott McCloud’s comic book about the new browser:

[from Google Chrome and the future of browsers]

Scott McCloud’s drawings aren’t just a useful pictorial explanation of what to expect in Chrome; it’s practically a declaration of independence from the yesteryear traditions of browser design of the past 10 years, going all the way back to Netscape’s heyday when the notion of the web was a vast collection of interlinked documents. With Chrome, the web starts to look more like a nodal grid of documents, with cloud applications running on momentary instances, being run directly and indirectly by people and their agents. This is the browser caught up.

I think that building Gears into the browser, and countering the notorious instability of browsers, are all good. I am going to particularly like the graggin and dropping of tabls from one browser window to another.

The angle that interest me, most however, is that Google seems to be becoming Microsoft, moving from search, to “office” apps and email, to phone architectures, to the browser.

I don’t know if Chrome is that radical of a metaphor shift, really. I am awaiting innovations based on the ‘web of flow’ instead of the ‘web of pages’, but will will have to wait awhile for that, I guess. There seem to be intent on making a more reliable and stable variant of the now established browser concept: a generalized application to act as the principle means of navigating and interaction with the web.

Are they going to start building in functionality to Chrome that will benefit Google’s other market aspirations? Building in Gears — which they have contrived to support the offline use of Google apps — is one example. What about a mobile version of Chrome that plays best on Android? Close integration with Google search?

It’s shiny, yes it is. But Google might be becoming a monopolistic mess.