Google Browser

[mobilebadboy]

September 19, 2004 -- Google, $1.67 billion richer from its August initial public offering, is spending its money poaching the brightest minds from arch-rival Microsoft and other tech giants.

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.

http://www.nypost.com/business/30438.htm

[James]

http://www.gbrowser.com 's whois pretty much gives it away.

[The New Guy]

Unless they take over the Mozilla Project, I cant see their browser doing anything.

[ozgression]

Probably just intergrating their Gmail, Toolbar, Orkut, Blogger fuctions etc. into a mozilla browser?
________
Dodge Kahuna history (http://www.dodge-wiki.com/wiki/Dodge_Kahuna)

[Kyle]

Wow... here's what I'm feeling...

Getting webmaster approval is very important. The reasons I use Internet Explorer are 1) the google toolbar... 2) alexa.

If they get webmaster approval, then those webmasters may recommend the browser to their friends and family. And there it grows. I know I would recommend it if its quality. Just as I recommended the Google search engine years ago when my family was using Yahoo, Webcrawler... I wouldn't be suprised if the same recommendation happens when the gbrowser launches (assuming they make it awesome).

[MarkB]

All they need do is make it so only the Google browser shows up-to-date PR, and everyone (well, out of us:p) will use it ;)

[michael_gersitz]

lol, people still use it even thought Pr is so old...

[Percept]

The way I see this, a Google browser based on Firefox could be a huge push towards standard compliant webdesign. A simple link on Google.com with "Try our browser" would in 1 day, reach more people then all the Firefox promotion pages currently availble.

[James]

I agree Percept.

Only problem is this (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com)

But I think that they know that there'd be lots of webmasters very pissed if it weren't very standards compliant.

[MarkB]

lol, people still use it even thought Pr is so old...

But web devs would use another browser if it were the only one with updated PR ;) I know I would!

[Percept]

I agree Percept.

Only problem is this (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com)

But I think that they know that there'd be lots of webmasters very pissed if it weren't very standards compliant.

The reason Google.com isn't standard compliant is because "everyone" is using IE ... if they released their own standard compliant browser to the web they could (drastically) decrease microsoft's marketshare and eventually change their own pages to comply with the WC3.

[Westech]

I think that one of the main reasons Google isn't standards compliant is to save bandwidth. The smaller they can get their file sizes the better. For instance, every time they use <br> instead of <br /> they are saving two bytes. Notice that they also use hardly any newlines (carriage returns.) Each carriage return wastes a byte of space as well. For most of us, a tiny savings per page like this wouldn't matter, but for someone with the traffic that Google has it matters a lot. Say they save 20-50 bytes per page by doing this and then multiply that out by however many millions of pageviews Google gets every day and it adds up to quite a bit of savings.

[Percept]

I think that one of the main reasons Google isn't standards compliant is to save bandwidth. The smaller they can get their file sizes the better. For instance, every time they use <br> instead of <br /> they are saving two bytes. Notice that they also use hardly any newlines (carriage returns.) Each carriage return wastes a byte of space as well. For most of us, a tiny savings per page like this wouldn't matter, but for someone with the traffic that Google has it matters a lot. Say they save 20-50 bytes per page by doing this and then multiply that out by however many millions of pageviews Google gets every day and it adds up to quite a bit of savings.

:eek: Ok, you're joking right ? XHTML/CSS is smaller then table-based pages ...

[James]

I agree that they should have an external CSS file, and have the layout based off of it.

That'd make the page way smaller. Well, not "way" but still quite a bit of savings in bandwidth monthly.

[Westech]

:eek: Ok, you're joking right ? XHTML/CSS is smaller then table-based pages ...

I'm not making the generalization that table-based pages are smaller than XHTML/CSS based pages. I'm saying that you can get smaller file sizes if you don't constrain yourself to using XHTML compliant code and just worry about using as few characters as possible. This is what I believe Google does to save on the bandwidth bill.

[James]

<style><!--
body,td,a,p,.h{font-family:arial,sans-serif;}
.h{font-size: 20px;}
.q{color:#0000cc;}
//-->
</style>
and <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
Which is shorter?
Why don't they link to it? Maybe because that's worse for them because it needs to load more than 2 files (logo and page)

[intelliot]

yeah. it makes you load an additional file (another request to the server).

I think that for the most part, they just don't care. they gain virtually nothing by going standards-compliant.

[Percept]

Instead of being the "don't be evil" company, they should be the "be good" company ... they are the only company with a large enough userbase arround the world (except in asia) to be able to go against Microsoft's IE

[James]

Even Asian users would love to use it. I remember them using the backwards Google because that was a loophole or something that allowed them to use it.

[intelliot]

"don't be evil" is sort of a reference to microsoft which is commonly known as being evil. "be good" doesn't make this allusion; in addition, it sounds slightly childish imho.

[incka]

elgooG resworB