[Update] Sept 26th, 2008: Added the SRWare Iron browser under Downloads
The Next Browser War
The next Browser War has begun yesterday night, when Google released their new view on the Web. A new Browser called “Chrome“. Chrome is the most powerful weapon, when it comes to the question: how to connect services locally stored on your PC with services available on the net.
Microsoft – the market leader in the field of operating systems – cannot be amused about that. Chrome has the potential to make a large amount of local stored services (like Office solutions) dispensable, means: what will we need Windows for?
The Thing with the Privacy
But it is that simple only from the view of the economists. Highlighting the potentials is their sphere of action. With a sociological view people will ask, why they should give eben more private data in the hands of Google. Google’s only ambition is making money through advertisements, thus giving away for free all the services people will need in order to provide the users with customer specific advertisements.
Even now Google has already collected more private data than Microsoft ever had the possibility to. And every Chrome installation got a unique serial number integrated. That serial will be used for tracking and aggregation of customer behaviour data. We will see how people will agree with Google’s strategy.
The Future
What likely is: the end of Mozilla could be coming silently. In the past Mozilla actually was bankrolled by Google: 85% of their revenue comes from Google (read here and here). Although Google and Mozilla prolonged their sponsoring contracts until 2011, there is basically no need for Google to sponsor Mozilla anymore, when supplying an own browser like Chrome.
Google’s battle against Microsoft has reached a new level of escalation. We’re quite certain to see Microsoft’s answer very soon.
Downloads
» Download Mozilla Firefox here…
» Download Google Chrome beta here…
» Download Internet Explorer 8 beta here…
» Download Opera here…
» Download Apple Safari here…
» Download SRWare Iron here (german page!)…
Performance Tests
Golem.de did a performance test for all these browsers. Find it here: