Google Chrome

Google has entered into browser war with its set up of Google Chrome - the open source browser from Google. Though there had been lots of bruits in the market about Google producing a browser but they restrained it almost as a top secret project. And on the other hand they originated supporting Mozilla's Firefox - the open source Browser. (However, there is good news for Mozilla - Google will be encouraging Firefox till 2011.)

Do you remember the browser war of 1990s? At that level of time Eric Schmidt was the CTO of Sun Microsystems. After that in 2001 he linked up Google and was immediately approached by Larry and Sergey Page about producing a Google Browser. However, Eric put it down on the basis saying that Google was not yet ready to get into the Browser war.

As soon as Chrome was founded (along with the great chrome comic book that was developed chiefly for bloggers and journalists to supply an overview), the whole blogosphere and webmaster's forums got active speaking about it.

More interestingly, webmasters got busy to understand the user data sharing options in Chrome and how Google could be taking advantage from the browser. One big reason for webmasters being skeptical about Google Chrome and user information extraction is Google's advertisement network and its history (webmasters and bloggers had been too vocal to make Google delete and disclose user data and privacy issues). Concerns among webmasters about data dealing became such a prime concern that Matt Cutts (the unofficial Google Spokesperson and Google engineer) had to measure in and reply in his blog about different data aspects of Chrome.

However, Chrome has a good feature to go to incognito mode if the user do not want share any private data with the website he or she is browsing or with third party. And this characteristic is somewhat similar to Microsoft's IE8.

This in turn, put the online advertisers into a lot of dilemma as these developments can restrict them to seize valuable data about the target audience to offer more targeted ads for a better ROI. As Dave Morgan, former AOL executive and Tacoda (advertisement network) founder commented in a famous HYPERLINK "http://www.adweek.com"advertising magazine "this is a data-ownership play". Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai, conceives that they (both Google and Microsoft) are "doing it for the right reasons" to set up a middle ground regarding user data secrecy.

Anyways, Google had to do it. Google still takes the maximum share of the current search industry. But, multitude need to use a browser to get into Google. Now, when Google has launched the browser, it is one step closer to developing its complete solution on the web industry.

Google has already captured around 2% of browser market. However, there is another prospect that Google must consider. General exploiters get IE by default when they install Windows in their computer. And the 2% mainly consists of web savvy group. What is Google planning to get general people? Is there another effective system in the card?