Sebastian Nohn

Weblog

Google Chrome

So with Chrome, Google joined the browser market, having chosen Webkit, the same engine that drives Apple's Safari and some mobile browsers (including the Android browser and Nokia's Series 60 Browser) as their rendering engine. Originally based on KDE's KHTML, Webkit has always been one of the best engines from an architectural point of view, their HTML rendering accuracy however has not always been the best, which luckily changed since Apple stepped into the browser market.

But will Google have a chance in a game that's dominated by Microsoft and Mozilla (a company that generates most revenues from Google btw.)? Speaking of the desktop market, with IE 8, Microsoft has a promising browser in their pipeline. With Chrome, Google has a promising browser in their pipeline, with Gecko based Firefox, Mozilla has a good browser in the market and with IE 7, Microsoft has a browser that works well for a lot of people in the market. Safari and Opera currently are only relevant in some niche markets.

In the mobile market things are a bit different. Opera is a lot stronger, Gecko doesn't have a recognizable market share, although Mozilla is trying hard. The rest is divided up between IE and Webkit.

While the second browser war just cooled down with Gecko's market share stalling around 20-25%, Google now declared war on Microsoft in the browser market, but will it really be a browser war or more a rendering engine war? Will Microsoft be able to defend against Opera & Webkit in the mobile market? Will there be any significant changes to the desktop market?

What makes a browser a winning browser? I had the chance to try out Chrome and it's fast and renders accurate, but currently it's not viable for me for several reasons, including:

No extensions. Where's my NoScript, my web developer tool bar, my LiveHTTPHeaders?
No options. I can't disable JavaScript, Plugins, Java etc.
No privacy. Google EULA allows them to collect a lot of data about me and my surfing behavior, to inject ads wherever they want and to use my or other peoples content for their marketing purposes.

Google has a chance if it makes the browser really open, accepts contributions from outside Google and fixes issues for power users: Extensibility, configurability, privacy, maintainability (MSI packages etc.). Looking at today's numbers, Google was able to attract a lot of people to test out Chrome. Interestingly, Firefox lost, what Chrome won, IE kept untouched. Although it's to early to draw the consequences, but I bet, this isn't what Google intended. Webkit however has a real chance to become one of the leading rendering engines:

The Chromium code looks clean, so maybe we'll see forks for power users/people that have privacy concerns against Google. This in fact could be a serious threat for both Microsoft and Mozilla. We'll see what happens.

Posted Sep 05, 2008
Tagged as: Firefox, Google, Microsoft, Web, Webkit

Firefox 2 changed to the worse

Example 1: Closing Tabs

In Firefox 1.5 it was possible to close tabs with the mouse without having to move the cursor to each tab.

In Firefox 2, the right corner of the tab bar got a new functionality to list all tabs. It seems, this functionality can't be changed. To close a tab, you have to move the cursor to the right corner of each tab.

(Yes, I know [CTRL]-[T])

Example 2: Clearing Private Data

In Firefox 1 it was possible to decide, which private data to clear on demand.

In Firefox 2 you are not able to decide, which data to clear on demand. It's all or nothing.

Posted Oct 26, 2006
Tagged as: Firefox, Rant, Software Quality

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