But like so many others, Allen still questions whether web openness will succeed in the mobile world. "On the internet, there's no central party that controls the bandwidth," he said.

Lovely to hear that coming from a M$ person!

"People can change from Firefox to Chrome to IE to Safari and still use their web apps."

Like fuck they can . How about making them all render HTML consistently and correctly before doing anything else?

So Google can finally push Chrome via OEMs, now that they lost the beta tag, good for them.

Paris because whoever wrote this article can't pick a normal title that summarizes it's content.

Oh wait, no it's not. Chrome doesn't run on any of my computers.

This strategy does actually make good sense.

Why invest time, money & effort into the web standards that allow you to drive your business model forward, when the implementations are so (comparatively) poor.

By implementing their own very "compliant" product, they a create an instant market for the solutions they want to "sell", as well as creating competitive pressure on other browsers to improve, and thus increase their potential market in the long run as well.

You could argue, why don't they just contribute code to Firefox, but they have no control over what is actually released, or it's long term product direction. Too much pressure and Mozilla becomes a "Google mouth piece".

If they fork Firefox and run on their own, then they get accused of all sorts of nefarious activities against a well regarded OSS project.

Neither outcome does Google's reputation any good.

There is also the bonus, that even if Chrome only gets a 5% market share that's still 5% fewer users they have to pay to have redirected to Google services.

Personally, even as a Firefox fanboy, I very much welcome any standards compliant competition. Thanks in a large part to MS, the web's potential has stagnated for far too long.

"But Opera couldn't make the intercontinental flight from Norway. And Apple couldn't make the eight-minute drive from Cupertino."

Love it!

Have other people tried using Firebug for debugging like me only to find it very irritating? Breakpoints and code profiling not hooking correctly for page unload events, Firefox search-as-you-type functionality not supported, no horizontal scrolling to active code, no ability to reposition the executing statement line, frequently forgetting the chosen script file and slower than Microsoft Script Editor? Though I don't like it, I often fall back to using MSE in IE to debug script.

Another reason for Chrome is that Google gets a window into the habits of web surfers which improves their AI and advertising. Microsoft and Apple have their own browsers and this gives them an advantage as they have an eye from the client end. So even if Google get 5% of the browser market it is enough to get valuable information on clients surfers habits and coupled with their other stats and information at the server end, they get a fuller picture of what is going on.

"But Google is merely interested in making the web a happier place - not raking in billions upon billions in additional ad revenue. According to Google."

The author is being a putz -- in both senses of the word (see http://www.thefreedictionary.com/putz). The chrome product manager plainly states that he hopes that "JavaScript gets 20 times faster and there are multiple web browsers that do what we want... we're going to be a more profitable company." But don't worry Cade, you're still insightful and clever, no matter how much you ignore the content of your own story.

Balls , Closed source frameworks like adobes flash are quite literly the future . Just look at flash's GPU acceleration for example ,

The platform isnt plagued by variation which plagues the "open internet"

Or, the only reason for Chrome as I like to call it.

The "making the web better" bit is pure and total bullshit. Either they comply with the standards and contribute to the standards enhancement processes (and there's no need to make your own browser to do this), or they produce Googly "enhancements" in Chrome to suit themselves, making their pages look better than anyone elses (best viewed in Chrome - download now). My money's on the latter.

Bill, because he invented this strategy.

when you use it with a flaky 3g broadband connection - cos of it's architecture with each tab being in effect a seperate browser instance - it means you don't get 3g tab freeze like you do with firefox / ie - that is, when trying to get data the entire browser stops responding. I know this could be fixed by using anything other than hutchinson 3g as a carrier, but ho hum...