Chrome is dead?
September 2008 by admin
RIP Chrome
Is Google’s Chrome browser “flat-lining” as John Brandon at Computerworld says or have things simply calmed down to normal while Google works quietly at just following their own master plan?
What used to be a flash of new articles, posts and reports about Chrome each day have significantly faded off in the last few weeks, but as posted yesterday, visits to www.chromevoice.com continue to grow and so do the percentage of visitors using Chrome.
After looking and watching and looking some more, I think Google continues to operate in their own world, simply following their long term plan, one that has clear objectives, yet leaves the implementation up to the really smart people on the Chrome team (and of course open source contributors).
Remember the announcement of Android last year? After a bit the hype died down, but Google kept working on it and now it’s going to be released next month.
Pundits who call Chrome to be dying now will surely be eating crow come this time next year.
Wanna bet?
See all of John Brandon’s article in Computerworld here.
I do think browsers need a lot more hype and momentum than other kinds of software. A tool like Google Scholar can sit idly for months and then get a refresh and it will take off. A point I didn’t make and should have: I used Netflix.com today to use watch Heroes, it does not and probably won’t ever work in Chrome. Then again, it doesn’t work in Safari, Opera, Camino, or even older versions of IE either. I’m not against Chrome, i just think to be a success it needs more emphasis.
I agree that its success needs more emphasis. I think that will come over time and in the typical Google style of “quietly slipping into a dominant market position while everyone else is focused on the hype of the moment”.
The lack of hype around Google’s product launches reminds me of the common engineering mentality of “product first, marketing is secondary”.
I haven’t tried Netflix with Chrome yet, but a day into our “Living In The Google World”, I’ve switched to the Chromium nightly builds because some of the odd behaviors I was seeing from the public release of Chrome.
In typical engineer fashion, I’m seeing small but meaningful bug fixes and cleanups. Nothing earth shattering, just clear and measured progress.