I thought of an easier way to explain the formatting problems y'all see. In the early days, there were only minimal common standards in HTML. Netscape and IE invented their own primitive 'tags' that controlled how your page looked, and gave more control, but that were incompatible with each other's browser. So you would build for one browser, accept that your page wouldn't look completely right in the other, then tell users which browser you wanted them to use. Later, after web standards were more developed, browsers used a common set of tags- but also had to support the old tags so that old pages would still work. But imagine what happens after 15 years of this: you have this whole train of old inefficient methods of doing things that have been replaced with a more efficient and commonly shared way of doing things, and you can never be sure whether a page will contain both old and new tags, and so you don't have control. This has been a big issue for pro web developers for a while now, and finally browsers are no longer supporting the old, heavy and inaccurate methods. I know that from your perspective it seems like the browser's fault, but really it's the way the page is built. Think of it kind of like trying to drive a model T on the freeway- for years you've had a special slow lane, but the highway department is now taking it away for another fast lane. .. Darn, another hashed metaphor. Too late at night, and too long at work. Again, study up or hire a pro (Like me! ;-) )
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The Cloud's Chrome Lining
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For a couple of years now, Google has offered toolbars and widgets that let users tack their applications onto existing frameworks, such as blogs, desktops and even Internet Explorer. "This is a natural extension of that," says ABI's Wolf. But the trick is going to be in getting average users to abandon something familiar (IE) to download something new--even if it's free. Since more savvy users are likely to already have installed Firefox, the challenge will be to convince them that Chrome offers enough worthwhile features to switch. One carrot might be in mobile, and integration with Google's open-source mobile platform, Android. Chrome is built with WebKit, the same open-source-browser engine that is used by both Apple's Safari and, intriguingly, Android--suggesting that Google is making a bid for mobile browser supremacy. This would pit it, most likely, in a fierce fight against the iPhone and its Safari-enabled ecosystem.
In the short run, it seems unlikely that Google is poised to achieve desktop browser dominance. That may not be their primary goal anyway. After all, Google is really just an incredibly sophisticated advertising platform, and Chrome is its most eloquent expression of that fact yet. "As far as Google is concerned, the more that people use the Internet rather than constrict themselves to applications on a hard drive, the better it is for them to run their ad business and collect information on them," says Carr. "Getting the browser modernized, getting it to be a means of running applications, is crucial to Google's business--and cloud computing--in the future." In other words, Google is hoping to make it rain.
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