Chrome, the web browser from Google

Chrome, the web browser from Google

Interesting. I was sceptical of the rumours that Google ever was actually working on such a thing - why would they, when Firefox is already so good and includes a Google search bar by default?

I like that it uses the WebKit rendering engine - as a web developer, subtle differences in the ways WebKit works just seem more intrinsically ‘right’ to me. Not that I have any serious reservations against Gecko, but I do note that Firefox is very quickly becoming the last browser that uses Gecko for rendering, as more and more new projects choose WebKit, and some like Epiphany are even moving away from Gecko to WebKit.

Yet I still use Firefox, because the most important feature to me, by far, is the ability to add extensions. There’s simply nothing else like this in any other browser. There’s also apparently no mention of it in Google’s plans for Chrome, but I suppose it’s still possible.

Aside from this, Chrome looks like it only has a handful of trivialities to set it apart from any other browser. In fact, it looks to me like they could have been done as Firefox extensions, or at most, a Firefox derivative (as Flock did). And many of them have already been done by Opera (including that awful, wrong tab placement). So I guess my question remains - why?

One final note - this is not related to Mozilla’s own ’Chrome’. Google really could have picked a name that wasn’t already in use, by another web browser no less.

( Edit: I realise now that their point was likely that the browser’s only relevance is as inconsequential decorations next to what’s really important, namely, Google’s services. If that is the case, I can’t help but question the strategy of giving your product an intentionally depreciating name. Plus I just think it sounds silly.)