The second browser war

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Several years ago, Silicon Valley was rife with rumours that Google, then primarily a search engine, might be building a new web browser to rival that of Microsoft, called Internet

Explorer, or even an operating system to rival Microsoft’s Windows. Google mocked those rumours and they died down. But if Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, is to be believed, the speculation itself made him think that “maybe it’s not a bad idea”. And so last week Google did launch a new browser, called Chrome, that is also, in effect, a new operating system. The rumours, says Mr Brin cheekily, “just happened to migrate from being false to being true”.

Chrome amounts to a declaration of war-albeit a pre-emptive one, in Google’s mind-against Microsoft. So far, Google has been coy about admitting the rivalry (whereas Microsoft, especially its boss, Steve Ballmer, is obsessed with it). In web search and advertising, Google dominates-roughly as Microsoft does in operating systems and office applications. To the extent that Google has challenged Microsoft’s core business, it is through Google Docs, its online word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications. But these, so far, have few users.

Google’s fear has always been that Microsoft might use its grip on people’s computers and browsers to tweak the default settings so that Google’s search engine and other services were disadvantaged. This, after all, is how Microsoft behaved in the 1990s, when it crushed Netscape, an early pacesetter in the browser business.

Microsoft’s fear, by contrast, has always been that computing might move from having the operating system as a platform for applications to running on the web (or “cloud”).

This is why it attacked-also pre-emptively, in its mind-Netscape and landed in antitrust court.

As Google rose to dominate the web during this decade, it therefore invested a lot of energy in a rival web browser to Explorer, called Firefox. An open-source project (ie, one whose code can be altered by anybody), Firefox comes from a foundation, across the street from Google’s offices, that happens to be based on the remnants of the old Netscape. Google’s engineers contribute code to Firefox and pay the foundation a share of advertising when people search Google in the browser’s toolbar. Thus Firefox rose to become the second-largest browser after Explorer, with almost 20% of the market.