Impact of Google Chrome on Businesses, Users and Developers

Gmail. Does it sound like a domain for which people can readily give up their years old account which is known to very old friends to current colleagues? This was at a time when most of "with friends" communication used to take place over email as there were no social networking sites. Granted Gmail was a superior product as compared to its primary competitions of Yahoo! and Hotmail and was offering unheard of storage of 1GB. But that alone wasn't the reason because of which people left famous email services in drones.

Google had a superior marketing strategy together with a brilliant product. They made Gmail "invite only" and hence a status symbol. People were getting crazy for Gmail account. Overnight, there were sites to facilitate barter of Gmail invites with money to what not. Hotmail and Yahoo! truly lost the battle when they started acting unethically by blocking Gmail invites. And today, virtually everyone I know have Gmail as their personal email address.

Google Chrome. Google's dedication and enthusiasm towards this project can be estimated by

1) Their offering of a brilliant comic for the product description rather than a manual
2) Announcing the launch of Chrome within 48 hours when everyone was wondering if/when Google will be releasing this product

So, what does Google have to gain by offering a web browser?

Google's primary cash generating channel had always been targeted advertisement. Imagine the level of targeted ads Google can serve to a user if it knows everything that user does on the Internet. As of now, Google displays ads based on the content of the web-page. Combine that with user's search and browse history with demographics and you can have a major boost in likelihood of advertisement being of value to the user.

Mozilla and Microsoft

People are thinking Mozilla Corporation will be a bigger loser than Microsoft. Which is true to certain extent but not entirely..

• Mozilla derives more than 70% of its revenue from its partnership with Google.
  
• Firefox is crazily famous with techies because it is a superior product than IE
• IE is in use only because it gets bundled with Windows

Now, Google has superior product than Firefox and have unparalleled respect of end users for a tech company combined with reach that Mozilla never had.

Today IE has 72% of the market share (it varies from 55% to 75% depending upon target audience of the site). Firefox has eaten up rest of the pie but further penetration for them from this point onwards will be very tough. But a browser which can offer everything that Firefox offers and more and promoted through your favorite search engine can do wonders.

Once Google have their very own window to user's desktop they can choose to market their Office replacement products more aggressively.

For Users:

Chrome's biggest advantage apart from having superior rendering engine, faster javascript execution by compiling javascript to machine code and many UI tweaks is that it segregates tabs into processes. This will primarily result in

1. Virtually no memory leaks
2. Tab crashes rather than browser crashes

For Developers:
For web developers Chrome shifts the blame of a crash from browser to poorly written application code. It provides monitors for tabs. So user can see how much CPU utilization, data transfer etc is being done by an individual web application.

Chrome is open source. If it becomes even mildly popular it will give real competition to Firefox. Nobody wants Firefox to become another IE in absence of an able contender.