Does the world need another Web browser? Hell no!

Rodney Gedda

Rodney Gedda is the former deputy editor of CIO and former editor of Techworld.

I’ll be out of the office on a week’s leave from tomorrow which is probably a good thing because if I see another story on Google’s Chrome Web browser I think I’m going to flip out. I just succumbed and downloaded Chrome on my work PC. It’s fun to play with and has some nifty features, but I just can’t see why Google would want to splinter the Web browser market even more.

Web browsers all essentially do the same thing and as we’ve seen with Firefox are easily extensible, so there’s no reason why a lot of Chrome’s functionality can’t be added to it.

Funny, my last blog post was about IE battling it out with Firefox and then this happens, who knew.

Chrome does use the Webkit rendering engine, which is great if Google gives back code to the community.

Webkit came from Apple Safari which came from KHTML. Apple was notorious for not playing well with the open source community, so I doubt Google will make the same mistake. Google understands community development more than Apple and isn’t afraid to help out on projects that it doesn’t directly benefit from, which is in the spirit of open source hacking.

What I would have really liked to see is Google extending the existing open source products already out there – like Firefox and Konqueror – rather than dump another free browser out there. Konqueror 4.x is now cross platform too!

Oh well, each to their own, and Google most certainly has its own reasons for doing Chrome.

Perhaps it felt stonewalled by the pace and style of Firefox development?

I hope I’ll find out next week.