I’m obviously going to try the new Google browser, Chrome, when it comes out. But there are two three things to note. The first is that it seems to me a further instance of Norwegian world domination: it is based on Apple’s Webkit, which is in turn based on the KHTML part, which is in turn based on Trolltech’s Qt toolkit. This is bad news for another bunch of Norwegians, at Opera, but it it’s still true that the most advanced browsers on the planet from the Oslo or thereabouts.
This was obviously a browser built by very smart people, which brings me to the second point. Google’s publicity material for it is mostly in the form of a comic book. Is this really the future of literacy? Do smart young people find reading plain print so hard?
Thirdly, although the broswer has a “porn mode” concealing all your tracks from the operating system and from other users of the same computers, I will bet everything I own that it has no way of disabling Google’s tracking of users, which makes thier database even more valuable.
I will bet everything that I own that if it doesn’t have a way of disabling Google’s tracking of users that the first thing that will occur when the code is released will be a fork that specifically blocks Google tracking. (I’m assuming they’ll use an Apache licence or derivative since they’re using that for Android)
Also, KHTML isn’t exactly based on Qt, it certainly comes from that milieu but it was always the Konqeror browser that used Qt and KHTML. Although note that Qt now includes an embedded copy of WebKit in its latest versions.
Oh dear, I’ve wasted my life.
On the other point, I think the comic is about the most effective means of controlling the terms of the online debate around a product launch that I’ve ever seen.
Yes, the comic is marketing genius. Quite the most impressive thing about it, so far.