Nik Rawlinson
It’s good to mix things up, which is why MacUser welcomes Chrome…
Do we need another browser? Of course not. Safari makes a better-than-decent stab at rendering web pages, and it’s fast – well, fast enough – for most needs. That hasn’t stopped Google from rolling out Chrome for the Mac, though, albeit in beta form at the time of writing. After months of waiting, hinting and debugging code, it’s finally out. And I like it. So does MacUser’s deputy editor, Kenny Hemphill.
Which brings me back to my original question: do we need another browser? You may as well ask do we need another word processor when we’ve already got Word, Mellel and Nisus Writer, but then I’d point you to Bean, which is free, light and responsible for all of the written content you read in this mag from all of our internal writers.
Spreadsheets? Well, we have Numbers, Excel and more rival choices than you can shake an equation at, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have more.
So I ask again, why another browser? Well, apart from the fact that Chrome is proving to be an excellent window on the web, I’d argue that the best reason of all is the dilution of the status quo. Every new browser installed on your Mac chips away at the prevailing hegemony, and on a medium so diverse and global in nature as the Internet, that can only be a good thing.
We’ve already seen what happens when one company controls an unnatural proportion of the browser market. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, at one point, controlled close to 95% of all web page views – even on the Mac, before the days of Safari – and so wielded an unconscionable level of power over the very shape of the web. Not the net, mind you – merely the web and the way the pages we viewed were coded.
Internet Explorer’s market share may now have been tempered by legislative action on the national and continental level, but its influence is barely restrained. HTML developers must keep one eye on commonly used conventions and another on Microsoft’s browser of choice, which retains the power to define supplementary standards of its own. The upshot is an increase in workload and testing, when really it should be necessary to test on just one platform and expect all others to follow suit.
So do we need another browser? Yes, we most certainly do. The more fragmented the application landscape, the better, for both coders and end users. Google Chrome, then, we’re welcoming with open arms, but hoping at the same time that Google’s power and the range of online apps under its control aren’t enough to see Chrome become the next Explorer and start setting standards of its own.
