Google Chrome Comic | Web Slideshow | Download

Google’s new Chrome browser is an interesting entry into the revitalized “browser wars.” Given Google’s Apps and Gears, the browser has essentially become the “OS” that contains them, so it makes perfect sense that Google would want to extend into that area to give it more control, and provide custom functionality that could not be accomplished with other browsers that it does not control.

But what is also interesting is how Google chose to describe some of its capabilities and intentions to the world: with comics.

WATCH THE COMIC ONLINE

The comics form has a number of benefits, the most obvious being that it does a better job of explaining technical features of Chrome better than a dry spec sheet would have.
For example, what if Google had said this in a features section of a page describing Chrome: “Multi-process rendering engine eliminates browser hangs due to single-threaded JavaScript executions.”
I would have thought, “Gee, that sounds great, but I don’t really know what it means.” Well, the comics form allows the company to explain that in a non-intimidating way. It’s still not exactly lay-person speak. (It is more geared toward journalists and bloggers who will be more familiar with the jargon than the general public.) But many more people will now understand what’s going on under the hood and, more importantly, the resulting benefits.

WATCH THE COMIC ONLINE

A nice side benefit for Google is that because the team of people who worked on it are brought to life through the comic (rather than stultified by press-release lingo), it humanizes Google at a time when it is starting to get a bit of a big-bad-wolf-Microsoft reputation due to its size and clout. By focusing on the individuals, it takes the mega corporation out of the picture (literally and figuratively).

The comic itself was created by well-known online comics artist Scott McCloud, after doing many interviews with Google engineers. It’s a great example of using someone outside the nitty-gritty of the product development process, with a knack for story-telling, to craft the narrative of the product. Too many good products fall by the wayside because not enough attention has been paid to the narrative–in other words, telling the value proposition in a way that the audience can relate to.

DOWNLOAD THIS GOOGLE CHROME COMIC FOR FREE

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A decade on | Google’s Internet Economy | Analysis

It’s the success story to beat all internet success stories.

Ten years ago, on 7 September 1998, two young graduate students at Stanford University incorporated a company with the (then) odd-sounding name “Google”.

Today, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are billionaires. Their company is hugely profitable; between April and June this year alone, it reported a turnover of $5.7bn (£3.2bn) and generated a net profit of $1.25bn (the first quarter was even more profitable).

Not bad for a company that makes its money being a broker for and publisher of online advertising.

The secret of Google’s success, of course, is the algorithm driving its internet search engine. In fact, it is so good that it has entered our dictionaries.

People don’t search the internet any more, they google it.

The secret sauce

Some critics accuse Google of being a one-trick pony and warn that competitors, newly emerging and potentially better search engines, are a mere mouse click away. 

But Google’s secret sauce has more ingredients than its clever way of organising and ranking search results.

Equally important is the technology underlying the vast data centres that give Google the scale, speed and efficiency to serve its rapidly growing number of users.

And finally there are Google’s two money spinners: AdWords – which puts relevant advertisements next to Google’s own search results – and AdSense, the revenue-sharing deals that put Google’s context-driven adverts on third-party websites.

The clever thing here is Google’s restraint. It auctions advertising space not to the highest bidder but the most relevant advertiser, making Google users happy and generating more lucrative click-throughs to the websites of the advertisers.

Google’s real ambition

Google may be a money spinner, but the company says it has much more high-minded aims than making a fast internet buck.

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” claims its corporate vision statement.

Note the word universal. Whether high-minded or not, it is this “Google everywhere” ambition that makes it such a successful company.

Over the years, Google has been releasing a steady stream of innovative tools and services – some of them developed in-house, many others bought in from start-ups: Gmail, Google Docs for word processing and spreadsheets, Picasa for picture editing, Google Earth and Maps for location-based search and display of information, Blogger, YouTube’s video service … the list is seemingly endless.

Not that long ago this looked like random growth. But as these services get a more coherent look and feel, the pieces of Google’s puzzle are falling into place.

Every search we do, every tool we use helps Google to gather more information and organise the artefacts of our knowledge society.

The price to pay

Providing an entry point to Google’s search engine at every level keeps feeding our Google habit, and creates a virtuous circle: the more information Google has, the better its search results, the happier its users, the higher the click-throughs on adverts, the bigger the profits, the more money for new “free” services that entice users to surrender yet more information.

It may leave us happy and Google profitable, but is it a corporate disaster waiting to happen?

Messrs Page and Brin may famously – or notoriously – promise that Google “can make money without doing evil”.

But with Google hoarding all this personalised and traceable information in its vast data centres, issues of data safety, privacy, and corporate Big Brothership are looming large.

The chrome Android

Google is expanding because the internet is expanding. The definition of where the internet ends is getting hazy, with devices like fridges, digital picture frames and mobile phones becoming part of the internet-enabled world.

The company’s next steps are already mapped. This week it launched its very own internet browser, called Chrome.

Today’s browsers were built to show web pages, says Google, not to be platforms for complex applications.  Chrome promises to bring stability to our online experience – and the more computing happens on the internet, the more information Google can gather.

Coming shortly is an even more important piece of software called Android, Google’s (Linux-based) operating system for internet-enabled telephones.

Google makes the same business case as for  Chrome: today’s smart phones were not designed for the mobile internet, so Google steps into the breach.

Partner or rival?

The company started ten years ago by two students has the size to do it all.

At the end of 2007 it had 16,800 employees, and is reportedly hiring about 100 new people each week. 

But with Google spreading its wings and complementing more and more parts of our lives, a rapidly growing number of companies in ever more industries have to ponder whether this “search engine” is a partner, a competitor or a destroyer of business models.

Google’s company motto could quite as well be: “Anything you can do I can do better – and for free.”

It leaves even Google’s largest rivals constantly stressed out – whether it is Microsoft (who saw the beta launch of its new browser Internet Explorer 8 overshadowed by Chrome), or ailing web portal Yahoo, which was forced to agree a revenue-sharing deal by outsourcing some of its advertising to Google.

Even the people who happily pay Google top advertising dollar are getting worried. They complain that Google’s dominance could result in a lack of choice, not least since the company bought its way into the world of traditional display advertising on the web, through the acquisition of Doubleclick.

Triumvirate

This is especially true during the current economic downturn. Google expects that its revenue is going to hold up, because its advertising service is highly targeted and its success measurable. It’s the old media with their mass medium approach that have to worry.

And to reassure investors, Google executives are pledging that they won’t fall into the Yahoo trap of trying to turn Google into a media company.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told Conde Nast Portfolio that “one of the general rules we’ve had is ‘don’t own the content; partner with your content company'”.

But even here the lines are blurring. Is there a lot of difference between “old media” publishing the pictures and videos supplied by news agencies, freelance photographers and their own audiences, and Google News or YouTube?

For now, the Google juggernaut rolls on.

The two founders keep driving the company’s technical excellence, and Mr Schmidt – a veteran of the technology industry – ensures that the money keeps coming.

This triumvirate has made an informal deal to stick together for at least 20 years, says Mr Schmidt.Plenty of time for Google to secure its position as the lynchpin of our internet economy.

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https://tarunreflex.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/exploring-lively-googles-virtual-world/

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Google Chrome | Google Inc’s new Browser | Review | Download

Google Inc.’s new Web browser, called Chrome, does much of what a browser needs to do these days: It presents a sleek appearance, groups pages into easy-to-manage “tabs” and offers several ways for people to control their Internet privacy settings.

Yet my initial tests reveal that this “beta,” or preliminary release, falls short of Google’s goals, and is outdone in an important measure by the latest version of Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer.

Chrome is a challenge to Microsoft’s browser, used by about three-quarters of Web surfers. But it could equally be called a challenge to Microsoft’s Office software suite, because what Google really wants to do is to make the browser a stable and flexible platform that can do practically everything we want to do with a computer, from word processing and e-mail to photo editing.

To strengthen that effort, Chrome was designed to improve on the way other browsers handle JavaScript, one of the technologies used to make Web pages more interactive and more like desktop software applications. Google’s online word processing and spreadsheet programs use this technology, but it’s also very widely deployed on Web pages to do less sophisticated things, like drop-down menus.

At first blush, Google’s focus on JavaScript makes sense. JavaScript can eat up computer processor power, and if poorly used by a Web site, can bring down the browser. One of the things Chrome promises is that if one browser tab crashes, it won’t take down the whole program.

Chrome also has some cosmetic differences from Internet Explorer and Firefox, like putting the tabs at the very top of the window. That’s a nice move, but it’s the browser’s performance that really matters to me. And this is where Chrome’s attention to JavaScript might miss the point.

At work, I often have 40 or 50 tabs open in Firefox, grouped in different windows depending on which topic they pertain to. Frequently, Firefox would slow down all the other applications on my computer, then seize up completely.

At first I thought JavaScript was to blame, and blocked it from running. But that made many sites unusable, and it didn’t help: The browser still froze.

It turns out the culprit is not JavaScript but another technology used to make Web pages more interactive: Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash plug-in. It’s the program-within-a-program that plays YouTube videos and those annoying “splash” pages that some sites employ to dazzle you with animations before letting you do anything useful on the site.

Flash is a tremendous resource hog in Firefox, eating up processor time to the point where there is nothing left for other programs. It does this even if you’re not actively doing anything. Merely having a YouTube page open on your screen will suck power from your computer’s central processing unit, or CPU. This is outrageous behavior for a browser. It’s my CPU and I want it back.

Luckily, there’s a small add-on program for Firefox that lets the user prevent Flash files from running automatically when a page loads, and it turns Firefox into a stable, efficient browser.

What does this mean on Chrome? Well, it has the same problem. It lets sites running Flash take over your computer’s resources. It doesn’t hog the CPU quite as bad as with Firefox, but in a way, it’s more serious, because unlike with Firefox, there’s no way to stop Flash from running. Chrome’s controls are quite bare-bones, perhaps because it’s still in “beta.”

On the plus side, Chrome allows you to diagnose problems with runaway plug-ins easily, because it tells you exactly which pages are consuming which resources. Had I been able to do this with Firefox, it would have saved me from months of browser troubles.

So which one comes out smelling like roses? The beta of Internet Explorer 8, released just last week.

When playing a YouTube video, Firefox 3 took up 95 percent of the CPU time on a three-year old laptop running Windows XP.

Chrome came in at 60 percent — still too much. Especially since Google owns YouTube! You’d think it could make its browser work well with that site in particular.

Internet Explorer barely broke a sweat, taking up just a few percent.

When I told each browser to load eight pages, some of which were heavy with Flash and graphics, Firefox took 17 seconds and ended with a continuous CPU load of 50 percent. That means it took up half of my available processing power, even if I wasn’t looking at any of the pages.

Chrome loaded them the fastest, at 12 seconds, and ended with a CPU load of about 40 percent.

Internet Explorer 8 took 13 seconds to load, but ended with no CPU load at all.

So while Chrome’s performance is a little better than that of Firefox, in practical terms, it is far less useful, because it lacks the broad array of third-party add-ons programs like Flashblock that make Firefox so customizable. With time, it might catch up, but in the meantime, I’d recommend giving the new Internet Explorer a spin.