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Google Businesses The Internet

Will Google Launch A Browser? 984

Posted by timothy from the sweet-patooties-up-for-wager dept.
ServeYourWorld writes "The New York Post is reporting that 'Based on the half-dozen hires in recent weeks, Google appears to be planning to launch its own Web browser and other software products to challenge Microsoft.' I took a guess and did a whois search for Gbrowser.com and indeed Google Inc. is listed as the registrar."
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Will Google Launch A Browser? More

Will Google Launch A Browser?

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  • But will the download be invite only?
    • Wow. Considering how the GMail invite scene was early on, I can only imagine what the beta for GBrowser will be like.

      • Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by 56ker ( 566853 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:29PM (#10303555) Homepage Journal
        Well considering the demise in market share of IE and the rise of alternative browsers - eg Opera, Firefox, Mozilla etc.... it would seem smart to bring out a browser.

        Anyway - the way the beta system used to work was that it was invite only.... after all some people don't know how to write bug reports. :P

        • Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:42PM (#10303698)
          Considering IE still has quite a lot of market share and once Microsoft's currently-vaporware search service gets around to launching it will likely promptly be highly "integrated" with every computer in the world running both IE and Windows Update... it would seem smart to bring out a browser.

          • Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 20, 2004 @08:12PM (#10304047)
            True, IE does have the lion's share of the browser market.

            Interestingly enough, I reported on "user agents" at work today. Our web-based systems are used by many corporations throughout the world. All users are authenticated, and we strongly discourage robots. We stipulate that our users use "modern browsers"... we don't want to support outdated, buggy implementations.

            [I still can't imagine that web designers don't design for all modern browsers. We have a large and sophisticated application costing millions, and I have to say that it cost about $100 to make sure that we could support just about everyone]

            In any case, in my business, the IE6 market is almost exactly 67%. A year ago such a low number for IE was unthinkable. Happily, IE4 and IE5 combined are now well below 2%. [We don't support IE4 - piece of junk. IE5 is junky too: my case was to drop support, which I won.]

            There are some NS4 users remaining, but only a handful [unsupported]. Mozilla and Firefox have, of course, taken a huge chunk of IE's business. Safari is a strong player on the Mac front, but it still has market to gain to completely overshadow IE5/Mac. The Mozilla family is fairly popular on the Mac, but Safari is still leading the way.

            All the other browsers combined are less than 5%. That included Opera, Konqueror, Lynx, and other oddities and unknowns.
            • All the other browsers combined are less than 5%. That included Opera, Konqueror, Lynx, and other oddities and unknowns.

              You'd consider Lynx a modern browser?

              • Lynx is modern (Score:4, Informative)

                by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 20, 2004 @10:51PM (#10305050)
                Just because it doesnt display images doesn't mean it cant translate html.

                Depending on the criteria you use, you could call lynx a more modern browser than IE6.

                It has been developed more recently (Feb 2004 last major release)

                Like every other browser in the world, results will improve if the webmaster devotes some time to it.

                It works pretty well for strict xhtml.

            • Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. (Score:4, Insightful)

              by taernim ( 557097 ) on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @12:06AM (#10305441) Homepage
              [I still can't imagine that web designers don't design for all modern browsers. We have a large and sophisticated application costing millions, and I have to say that it cost about $100 to make sure that we could support just about everyone]

              You obviously have no QA or Development experience, do you? Maybe in your area coding for "all modern browsers" is trivial, but in many areas it is not. The changes just between versions of IE 4, 5, and 6 are fairly large from a design point of view. If you're throwing in Mozilla, Firefox, etc support, that adds a lot.

              If you have a QA division that is responsible for making sure that all browsers "work properly" that requires testing on all the different browsers. Did I mention each set of browsers may need to be tested on multiple OSes as well?

              Just because it only costs YOU $100 to do something that you say is trivial, does not mean that is anywhere near the case for others.

              • Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. (Score:5, Interesting)

                by badasscat ( 563442 ) <basscadet75@ya h o o.com> on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @03:28AM (#10306130)
                You obviously have no QA or Development experience, do you? Maybe in your area coding for "all modern browsers" is trivial, but in many areas it is not. The changes just between versions of IE 4, 5, and 6 are fairly large from a design point of view. If you're throwing in Mozilla, Firefox, etc support, that adds a lot.

                I couldn't agree more with this. A lot of people trivialize browser compatibility when it comes to web design - they either say "oh, just design to standards, and everything should work!" or they say "oh, just design to the lowest common denominator - if something doesn't work on one browser, just don't do it at all."

                Well, the problem with the first approach is it just plainly doesn't work. Whether or not something should work a particular way in a particular browser doesn't matter - it's whether or not it does work that matters. Every browser renders CSS a little differently, for example; even the functions that actually do work across browsers just look different depending on which browser you're running.

                The problem with the second approach is that it leaves you with basically HTML 2.0 to work with. And honestly, that's fine for some sites (it really is), but if you want to do anything at all interesting, it's just not workable.

                So the only thing you can really do is just design and code a site for the most popular browser out there and then hope it works with the others. If it doesn't, you try to fix it so it does - but depending on what you're doing, it may not even be possible without tossing what you've done and starting over (and then when you're done re-doing everything, some other browser that worked before will probably be broken with the new implementation).

                My last job was working in the new media division of a major game publisher (you can guess which one if I tell you it's the only one doing anything interesting on the web). We designed all of our sites in-house. We built for IE, because up until I left it was about 95% of our audience, and then we QA'd for other browsers (this was generally my job; I was the militant browser dude on staff). Invariably, there were things that either didn't work or worked differently than we'd intended on certain browsers. Most of the time these things could be fixed but it was not always trivial, and it was usually one of three things that caused the problem: CSS, JavaScript, or Flash action scripting.

                At the end of any particular project we'd usually spend at minimum several days troubleshooting browser problems. Given that we were in-house you can't really put a dollar value on that, but if you just divided up all of our salaries for that time period I guarantee you're talking tens of thousands of dollars on every project. That's time we could otherwise be spending creating something new instead of stuck fixing something that's otherwise finished, or it's time we could have otherwise used for things we'd have to contract freelancers for (so it did directly cost us money in many cases, and way more than $100).

                It's easy to say "well you should have just used standards" and it's easy to blame it all on IE but that's way too simplistic. Because for one thing, in marketing you're not just going to put up a site full of text, you need to use things for which there are no standards, such as Flash. Honestly, if somebody invented something open-source and standardized that does everything Flash can do, and then they managed to convince the world to run browsers supporting it, we'd have jumped all over it. But Flash is what it is; it's proprietary and unfortunately there's nothing else comparable that's popular. So you have to design in Flash, and when you've got, for example (and this actually happened to us), a button in your Flash that is supposed to open a file dialogue box on your machine and it works on IE and works on Firefox and works on Opera but doesn't work on Mozilla and doesn't work on Safari, what are you supposed to do? If you've got an inte

      • Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 20, 2004 @08:05PM (#10303983)
        It will be nothing like the gspot.

    • Google browser? Too awkward. They should... (Score:5, Funny)

      by truth_revealed ( 593493 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:53PM (#10303857)
      call it the "Growser".
      I can already see how it will revolutionize the english language:

      Joe: "Hey Hank, did you growse that info?"
      Hank: "Yeah, my growser growsed it up real good."
      Joe: "That's some mighty fine growsing, Hank."

    • Easy, rebrand firefox (Score:5, Interesting)

      by vwjeff ( 709903 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @08:43PM (#10304269)
      Really, what prevents Google from making cosmetic changes to Firefox/Mozilla. There is already the built in Google Search. Perhaps they would integrate a Gmail mail client.

      Or perhaps, I'm talking out my ass.

      • Re:Easy, rebrand firefox (Score:5, Insightful)

        by JeffTL ( 667728 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @09:44PM (#10304632)
        Firefox, MSIE, and Safari already have integrated Gmail clients -- the browsers themselves. A notifier and mailto handler might be nice, too, but that can be handled equally well with a plug-in.

    • Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Da_Weasel ( 458921 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @10:00PM (#10304730)
      Apple has an image browser called gBrowser. Wonder if that will cause problems with the naming of a google browser...

      http://homepage.mac.com/schwarz/gbrowser.html

  • Let me guess: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Patik ( 584959 ) * <cpatik AT gmail DOT com> on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:22PM (#10303449) Homepage Journal
    It tracks everything you surf so it can display relevant ads. No thanks, I'll stick with Firefox.

    Let's just hope that Gmail still works with other browsers.

    • Re:Let me guess: (Score:5, Informative)

      by Nurgled ( 63197 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:24PM (#10303476)

      Opera already does that if you enable the Google TextAds feature... with Google, no less.

      • Re:Let me guess: (Score:3, Informative)

        by NoMercy ( 105420 )
        And Firefox has an extention to do it too...

    • Re:Let me guess: (Score:5, Informative)

      by Short Circuit ( 52384 ) * <mikemol@gmail.com> on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:27PM (#10303534) Homepage Journal
      Firefox already does that [mozilla.org]. (Well, it doesn't exactly track you, and it only displays relevant ads if you want it to.)

    • Dear PATIK (Score:3, Informative)

      by Letter ( 634816 )
      Dear PATIK,

      Even Netscape 4 sent everywhere you surfed to a central server, although of course not with the purpose of serving ads. Remember "What's Related?"

      -Letter

    • Re:Let me guess: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lphuberdeau ( 774176 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:32PM (#10303584) Homepage
      From what I understood by reading the article, they might actually be planning to release some sort of modified version of Mozilla. Having more browsers using the Gecko engine sure can't be a bad thing. Plus, it will put some pressure on Microsoft to improve their browser and actually support standards.

      If Google places it's name on a browser, it will sure become popular in a matter of days.

      The success of standards depend on having multiple quality implementations. Right now, this remains a problem as only Mozilla does it right (Safari seems to be fine but I never really tested it).

  • Of course... (Score:5, Funny)

    by AngryParsley ( 809581 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:22PM (#10303452)
    The NY Post is never wrong.

  • It gets even better (Score:5, Funny)

    by Frac ( 27516 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:24PM (#10303478)
    Check out GOS.com.

    Google is launching a new OS based on Gloucestershire health clubs! Come on now, not even MS or Apple has thought of that one. [grins]

  • GBrowser (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:25PM (#10303483)
    I hear it's being developed in space. [google.com]

  • Rich web apps (Score:5, Insightful)

    by augustz ( 18082 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:25PM (#10303489)
    Google develops the rich web app stack. Applications can be deployed through the web with richer interfaces then HTML provides.

    Google has some of these apps (search, email etc).

    Google get's richer.

  • Nope (Score:5, Funny)

    by DanThe1Man ( 46872 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:26PM (#10303498)
    The company (Google) also hired four people who worked on Microsoft's Web browser...


    Woooh! I think not.

  • It would be more commendable . . . (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bedouin ( 248624 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:26PM (#10303506)
    If they propagated a Mozilla-based browser such as Firefox to their users. At one time I was a defender of Google, always citing their mantra of "Don't be evil," however I'm not quite sure what their intentions may be.

    Best search engine? Perhaps. But let's leave it at that.

    Don't be blinded by the generosity; they're potentially gearing up to be just as wicked of a monopoly as Microsoft. Whether their intentions are clear or not, that probably should not be happening, since too much power has a tendency to corrupt -- except under very exceptional circumstances.

    • Re:It would be more commendable . . . (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Your_Mom ( 94238 ) <slashdot&innismir,net> on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:35PM (#10303616) Homepage
      You can trace back most of the problems with Google down to one person. CEO Eric E. Schmidt.

      Eric has had a wonderful track record of running companies into the ground and doing stupid stuff. Novell (which rebounded after he left), SUN (in which he screwed over JAVA), and Xerox PARC (how many good ideas slipped through their fingers?).

      One of my professors, after Schmidt came onto Google, told us in class "Enjoy Google while it lasts, its going to start to expand into other areas and start to fail" and I am really afraid that he is going to turn out to be right.

      When Froogle came out I started to be afraid, when Gmail came out, I started to worry more, if this turns out to be true, I really weep for the future.

      • Re:It would be more commendable . . . (Score:5, Interesting)

        by avalys ( 221114 ) * on Monday September 20, 2004 @08:02PM (#10303949)
        What exactly are the "problems" with Google?

        I can't see what you might possibly find offensive about Froogle and Gmail, or why their respective releases made you "afraid" for the future of Google.

        • Re:It would be more commendable . . . (Score:5, Interesting)

          by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @08:37PM (#10304223) Homepage

          I think he raises valid concerns, perhaps not very well articulated though.

          His concern is that Google, under Schmidt, will 'diversify' and try to be everything for everybody, and stretch too thin for their own good.

          Another concern is their approach to privacy. They log every search tied to the IP address forever. The same in Gmail, where they don't delete messages. These things were covered in the media as concerns from users, but there was no satisfactory response.

          Don't get me wrong. I love Google as a search engine. I could not live without it. However, as I said before [slashdot.org] companies change, and are driven by pragmatism, not ethics. Google is now a publicly traded company. Will they be the next evil Microsoft? Maybe. I hope not though.

    • Re:It would be more commendable . . . (Score:4, Insightful)

      by One Childish N00b ( 780549 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:49PM (#10303800) Homepage
      This is why Microsoft developing a search engine and Google developing a web browser is a good thing - you can't be too evil if you have a competitor people could easily switch to, e.g. the Redmond boys have more than enough money to throw at developing a search engine to equal Google, and Google has enough support in the OSS community to write a cool browser and then slap a well-known, respected corporate name on the boilerplate and use it to trounce IE.

      Even if Google did 'go bad', then two evil companies fighting against each other can only be a good thing, as neither can be too evil or they will lose too much market and mind share to the other side. That's the beauty of the system. Of course, like the US elections, a two-horse race doesn't always give the people at the bottom much choice, but it ensures that neither side goes total fascist/monopolist on us.

  • Gindows (Score:5, Funny)

    by usefool ( 798755 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:26PM (#10303508) Homepage
    At this rate, we'll see gindow.com registered by google.com in no time.

  • More competition (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CrackedButter ( 646746 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:26PM (#10303511) Homepage Journal
    What if Google can do something or have something (an idea) which no other browser has implemented? Google has already shaken up the search market and is now shaking up the email market with its Gmail service. What happens if lighting can strike a third time and create some sort of healthy competition for the brower market once again? At least mindshare would come from it and people would realise there is more than just IE out there. A lot of people use google and they are not geeks either, which is what we want.

  • 'Will Google Launch A Browser?' (Score:5, Funny)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:26PM (#10303515) Homepage Journal
    Short answer: No.
    Long answer : Yes.

  • Web-based web-browser (Score:5, Funny)

    by giminy ( 94188 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:27PM (#10303522) Homepage Journal
    I took a guess and did a whois search for Gbrowser.com and indeed Google Inc. is listed as the registrar.

    I suspect that they will begin offering a web-based web-browsing solution (like gmail, but for HTTP) with roughly a gigabyte of bandwidth usage per day. This will no doubt be great competition for the other web-based web browsers, like ...
    Er, wait a second...

  • Invite only... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Davak ( 526912 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:27PM (#10303525) Homepage
    The current gmail marketing campaign [tech-recipes.com] is working well...

    The invite system allows the system to reduce the amount of load at one time... reduce the amount of beta testing, etc.

    GMail, GBrowse, GAnything -- they work because they remind people of this "wonderful" thing called google. As long as the letter G is associated with bigger and better, Google can send rumors of any google product...

    Any press... any rumors... is good for google.

  • I honestly hope... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jdoss ( 802219 ) * on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:27PM (#10303528)
    ... that the good folks @ Google are prepared for their first massive *shrug* from the masses. It would take something extraordinary for me to switch from Firefox at this point. I would imagine the same from a lot of people. They could cash in on the IE-weary public, looking for a change, but those of us using Gecko-based browsing are quite fanatical about it. :)

  • Searching (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rber0 ( 711590 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:27PM (#10303529) Homepage
    I guess we know what their default search engine will be ;D

  • Trademark registered yet? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Wespionage ( 751377 ) * on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:28PM (#10303546)
    Hopefully this time they will think to register the trademark early. But just in case, I'll just go ahead and submit this here application for Gbrowser, my new line of eyebrow glitter!

  • This totally fits with Google's recent hires... (Score:5, Informative)

    by MelloDawg ( 180509 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:30PM (#10303564)
    Back in July Dare Obasanjo noted on one of his blog posts [25hoursaday.com] that Google was hiring a bunch of people from the IE browser team and couple of Java guys from Sun.

  • For some reason (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HateBreeder ( 656491 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:35PM (#10303611)
    People seem to think that everything that google ever does is a god-sent gift!

    I think it's about time (Especially after the IPO), that people would realize that google, is first and foremost a company that's "in-it" for the money.
    with the word, money, being a key-word,
    especially when it comes to its shareholders.

    Soon enough, pressure from that direction would reach into company policy, and google would cease "doing no evil" ...

    I suggest, that we should all objectively judge each and every new product or service that google offers.

    Personally, I think a whole lot of very talented people are working together on the mozilla project, and they've been doing so for years.
    Why would anyone with a right-mind think
    that google could do any better in the short term?

    If anything, A usable product is YEARS from being ready, and by that time, who knows how powerful and advanced firefox or some other "now-working" browser would become?

  • Will it use pigeons to display web content? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ARRRLovin ( 807926 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:36PM (#10303629)
    That would be awesome, but incredibly messy.

  • The power of G baby (Score:5, Funny)

    by savagedome ( 742194 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:36PM (#10303631)
    Well, it certainly seems like Google is taking over everything that's G. Yes. You read that right. Eventually, everything that starts with the letter 'G' (or 'g') would be owned by Google.

    As other fellow /.ers have already suggested in previous posts and including the article, some of the ideas include gbrowser, gos, gthis, gthat, ginternet and gindows amongst others. Well, it all sounds fine and dandy. Now I just hope they will leave the gspot out of their jurisdiction.

    Can't find the damn thing anyway.

  • Heavy XUL hooks could make this a killer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:44PM (#10303728)
    ActiveX part deux, but this time it works. If Google was to push a site linked to XUL apps in a gecko-based browser, they could start owning the desktop outright.

    The key is tying the apps to the browser. If its just yet-another gecko browser, this will have limited impact.

    • Re:Heavy XUL hooks could make this a killer (Score:5, Insightful)

      by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Monday September 20, 2004 @08:25PM (#10304149) Homepage Journal
      The problem with XUL isn't with XUL :) it's with the javascript you need to interface with XUL. There's no documentation. You try to get stuff done and quickly discover that simple things that claim to work don't and if you're trying to do anything dynamic like change a style sheet at runtime there's no documented way to do it.

      • Re:Heavy XUL hooks could make this a killer (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Chester K ( 145560 ) on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @06:14AM (#10306649) Homepage
        There's no documentation.

        That's what I've been saying for months. I even got chided by some big-name Mozilla devs here on Slashdot for saying that the reason Microsoft's XAML will trounce all over XUL is because you can bet your ass XAML and all supporting infrastructure will be fully documented, because if you've ever seen MSDN, you know its staggeringly comprehensive. "Go to XULPlanet," I was told, "everything is documented there."

        Truth be told, XULPlanet only really documents maybe half the API. Sure, the interface definitions are there for the rest, but there's no description for most of it beyond the method names; the sample code coverage is virtually nil; and if you flip a coin and it comes up tails, XULPlanet.com will be down when you try to visit it and you need to hope that the incomplete mirror at mozdev has the page you want.

        After they ship Firefox 1.0, the best thing the Mozilla team could possibly do is to shift their resources to documenting. After documenting, finish up the XRE (come on, how many years is it overdue now?), then switch to evangelizing the platform a little more -- but not until the developer support doc is in place, and not until it can be deployed standalone.

  • Sure Google's competing with Microsoft... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Symbiosis ( 39537 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:48PM (#10303781) Homepage
    but what about poor GNOME? We're going to run out of g-based application names! Time to develop a new g-based naming system that expands the address space...

  • Too much? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @07:52PM (#10303835)
    C'mon, i love Google as much as anyone else, but is it really necesary? I mean, with the Google Toolbar already available for download and stuff. Integrated GMail would be nice too, but there's already a lot of perfectly useable browsers. Hell, i even like Opera's Google search better than any toolbar.

    I don't know, i get a little jumpy when i see companies (that i like, if that's possible) diversifying too much instead of focusing on what they do best. Usually it's a sign of bad things coming.

    • Re:Too much? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @04:46AM (#10306410)
      It could well be a form of self-protection rather than a "hey let's get into every business we can" move.

      Back before Microsoft got involved, Netscape had a near monopoly on browsing. They were the de-facto standard. Today, Google is pretty much the de-facto standard for search though I doubt they have as much market share as Netscape did back then.

      Behold the power of bundling with Windows. Netscape is no more. Why? Because Microsoft controlled the gateway through which people accessed their software. Given the noises MS has been making about competing "strongly" with Google lately, they must be scared the same would happen to them except via IE instead of the operating system.

      So, they want to produce their own browser, so it gets market share. That way nothing Microsoft does to IE (integrated search etc) can hurt them too much, because not many people are using IE.

      It would make sense for them to base it on Firefox. It's a best-of-breed browser, portable, and is going places. But, it lacks marketing! While the current Mozilla efforts are commendable, they'd be nothing compared to being promoted on the Google webpages.

      At least, this is the reasoning I'd use if I were them. It's not so much to branch out into new business, as to protect existing ones ...

  • I just made a stupid post..... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by WhiteWolf666 ( 145211 ) <(su.narima) (ta) (niwrehs)> on Monday September 20, 2004 @08:14PM (#10304063) Homepage Journal
    Then had a crazy idea.

    Imagine: The Google Desktop Environment.

    Complete with Gbrowser, the universal filemanager/web browser/gmail client, uber everything all rolled into one.

    Windows, Linux, Mac versions available now.

    *shivers*

    And, of course, all your 'google' apps are all cross-platform, since the client is all crazy java/web stuff anyways.

    Sorta google toolbar on steroids. /me goes back to sleep, leaves stupid dreamland.

  • Half-dozen hires != much software (Score:4, Insightful)

    by EmbeddedJanitor ( 597831 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @08:21PM (#10304119)
    Perhaps you can't enter a URL and just get google on the browser.

  • Mozilla... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by adriantam ( 566025 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @08:29PM (#10304175)
    Instead of developing a new browser, I would like to see Google releasing the browser as a re-packaging of Mozilla.

    Hence we can have one more standard-conforming browser and, by using the reputation and power of Google, to ask those "View only with IE" sites to change!

  • A Google Browser makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)

    by debian4life ( 701155 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @08:30PM (#10304186)
    It really does. It seems logical that since most people just assume Google is the only search engine anyway, that a Google Browser would seem to be a logical step in the company's progression.

    HOWEVER, I am a little worried that at some point, people want so much to fight one monster that they create another to combat it.

    Google search, GMAIL, the big IPO, GBrowser........GOffice for your web based DOC sharing, etc, etc, etc.

    I like Google Search and I like GMAIL, but at the same time, whenever I see a company heading down the road to tell me that I should use them for my "complete online computing experience", I do feel a little uncomfortable.

    I am not saying that is the case, and I am not saying any of this is bad. I like what Google is doing right now because new innovation is a good thing. But at the same time, I am aware of another company that wants everything I use to have their name attached to it and I am always keeping both eyes open.

  • Hmm, what could only a Google brand browser do? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Andy_R ( 114137 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @08:44PM (#10304275) Homepage Journal
    Spellchecking as you go (and other client-side things) for g-mail?

    Recommending pages you might like by feeding your history/bookmarks into a central database?

    Making google's web index more complete by flagging unindexed pages to HQ?

    None of the aboue sound very convincing reasons to write a browser to me, However, Firefox + some bells & whistles with the Google name and clout behind it could kill IE stone dead... and the wide adoption of an ad-blocking browser would push advertisers towards google text ads in their droves.

    The $64,000 question is, would this 'be evil'?

  • Bring out your browser! (Score:4, Funny)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @09:35PM (#10304597) Homepage
    man with cart: Bring out your browser!

    internet explorer: I'm not dead yet!

    opera: Ie Iesu domine! *thwap*

    internet explorer: I'm getting better!

  • tit for tat (Score:5, Funny)

    by Johnny Mnemonic ( 176043 ) <mdinsmore@noSPAm.gmail.com> on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @12:25AM (#10305526) Homepage Journal

    Isn't it more likely that Google is developing a browser as a defensive tactice? Something like this:

    ring, ring

    Sergey: Hello?

    Gates: Hello, Google. This is Bill Gates! We're going to release a search engine built right into IE, which is built right into Windows! Ha ha! You guys are pwned! Who's going to bother to load up Google now, when you can just click the shiny search button in our browser (plus Google no longer renders right)

    Sergey: That's funny. We're going to release a browser, with our search built right in. Think people would rather use MSN or Google for search? Do you think their search choice would guide their browser choice, or vice versa? And oh yeah, it doesn't work with streaming WMP. Who knew?

    Gates:...

    Sergey: And what happens to your dreams of internet domination when folks switch to our browser en masse, cause oh yeah, btw, it doesn't have security issues like IE?

    Gates:...well we didn't really want to do search...

    Sergey: Well! We didn't really want to develop and support a browser!

    All: It seems like we've come to an agreement then!

    Sergey: Have I mentioned Goffice? Online word processing, search all your documents by content, 1GB of guaranteed storage...

  • Could this mean KHTML on Windows? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Zulithe ( 669389 ) on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @02:04AM (#10305879)
    I'd welcome a Google browser. While it wouldn't surprise me if they wrote one from scratch, I think they would do better to port KHTML to Windows and build from there. With Apple contributing code to KHTML along with the Open Source community it's sure to have a fruitful and long life, couple that with the lack of a KHTML port for Windows and it would really fill a niche in the browser world. I hope you're listening Google!

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