Google Browser May Become Reality
There has been much fanfare in the Mozilla fan camps about the possibility of Google using Mozilla browser technology to produce a GBrowser – the Google Browser. Over the past two weeks, the news and speculation has escalated to the point where even Google itself is acknowledging the whispers among the tech community by featuring a section on Google News devoted to the browser mill.
Google browser news is not only restricted to search and technology sites either, the BBC released a piece summarizing all of the hoopla over Google’s browser (Google even owns the GBrowser.com domain name) after the New York Post reported an exodus of high profile tech monsters from the grasps of Microsoft, into the arms of Google. The newest Google employees are four people who worked on Internet Explorer (one being Adam Bosworth), another one from Java lead developers (Joshua Bloch) and another guy (Joe Beda) who was working on future Microsoft technologies like Avalon and Longhorn.
Google could not have picked a better time to be planning a new browser tool (that is, if they are). Security flaws and adware/spyware attacks have fueled a small but significant switch from Microsoft IE to Mozilla based browsers. WebSideStory reported that Microsoft’s share of browser users who visited top e-commerce and corporate sites shrank from 95.6% in June to 93.7% in September. Further more the tracking firm’s study showed that people using browsers made by Mozilla grew from 3.5% to 5.2%.
Besides the GBrowser.com name, the recent hirings, and the acceptance of Mozilla and other browsers by the general public, the real sticking point to the browser rumors could be that Google recently hosted Mozilla Development Day, Motley Fool reports:
To back up that idea, note that the company held a Mozilla Development Day on its campus, where programmers spent the day improving the renamed Netscape browser. The theory goes that building a new browser from the ground up might be unproductive, while adding to an already existing platform — the open-source Mozilla, for example — would be a huge kick-start.
With Google’s success with GMail, AdWords and Adsense, it seems that anything they touch turns into a huge success. However, browsers are a different breed and unless they go with an existing web rendering engine (our prediction is Gecko), it would be tough thing to do. Starting from scratch to develop a browser won’t be cakewalk even for Google.
