Industry welcomes Chrome as 'business as usual'

Computer industry executives have broadly welcomed Google's new browser, Chrome, with one or two reservations.

Google is expected on Tuesday to launch a beta of the open-source web browser, which will include security, performance and application-management features that usually are provided by an operating system. As such, it could encourage enterprises to start thinking seriously about web-based applications and pose an open-source challenge to Microsoft's dominant Windows.

Mark Taylor, founder of the Open Source Consortium, welcomed Chrome, telling ZDNet.co.uk that it was "open-source business as usual".

"Google's Chrome builds on open-source components, tweaking the browser to particular requirements. Improvements will travel back into the Mozilla browser," said Taylor, who is also chief executive of open-source vendor Sirius.

Google has been a partner of Mozilla for years, and a search deal between the two generated $56m (£31m) for the open-source project. Google is the default view on the homepage and in the search box of Mozilla's Firefox browser.

Taylor acknowledged that the arrival of Chrome would have an impact on his company. However, he said he believes it will have a greater impact on Microsoft and that the overall effect will be beneficial for open source.

"Will Chrome take market share from Mozilla? Probably. It will take market share from IE [Internet Explorer], absolutely," he said. "I suspect Chrome will grow the market for open source. It shows the whole [open-source] process is working."

Likewise, Gerry Carr, marketing manager of Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, Canonical, said he believes the effect will be positive for his company. "Open source is about innovation, and innovation is always helped by new players entering any market," he told ZDNet.co.uk. "We look forward to seeing how it develops and making it available to Ubuntu users as an open-source product when we can."

Mozilla understands the increased competitive pressure that the launch of Chrome places on its Firefox browser very well, according to a blog post by chief executive John Lilly.

"With IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc, there's been competition for a while now and this increases that," Lilly wrote. The only answer, he said, was "to build software that people care about and love".

Asked to comment on Chrome's likely impact on the IT industry, Microsoft focused its reply on what it considers to be the virtues of its ownupcoming browser, IE8, and particularly on "respect [for users'] personal choices". Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft, gave ZDNet.co.uk a statement highlighting the "highly competitive" browser market.

"People will choose IE8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online," he said.