The Impact of Google’s Chrome on a Mindset

Like millions of other people, I downloaded and installed Chrome the week it came out.  My reaction was a bit of a rollercoaster ride.  I loved the cleanliness and simplicity.  Great protection against crashes.  Nice private surfing mode.  But where are my developer plugins.  Where’s my status bar.  Where’s my 200 plugins that I’ve grown accustom to.  But wait, I can make it behave like an app?  I can do some of the developer functions without a plugin?  And, man is it fast with my jquery and prototype libraries.  Most of these have been reported on, so I won’t waste too much space…

But, what I realized today is that it kinda makes me think differently.  My browser is nothing but an environment to use applications that have data on the web.  Well, maybe even that is too strict–it is an environment to run applications.  Period.  For some reason, I’ve never thought of my trusty old Firefox that way.  Hmmm…  One of the areas that I have been doing a fair amount of research on is disconnected clients.  Silverlight and Air have been the two I’ve been spending the most time with, but the ability to house them in the browser and let Chrome create the shortcut creates some nice UI aspects.  Maybe it isn’t a web browser but an application host.  (Not that Firefox and, God forbid, IE aren’t, but they just don’t lend themselves to thinking that way as much.)  I guess the big question is what is the adoption going to look like.  If its big, then it really opens some doors in the corporate market to distribute apps that can really have the screen real estate they need (and deserve).