Google Chrome Out of Beta, Get Ready for Chrome Everywhere

It took the team over at Google only 100 days to bring Google Chrome from the initial release day to the version 1.0. The irony is that Chrome seems to be one of the most highly-criticized products ever made by Google - criticized for its lack of stability and frequent crashes. Yet it is this product that is rushed out of beta with a speed unseen in other Google products.

And while it is no wonder that people were more than happy about much hyped Chrome speed, it still did not seem to be a reason enough to think that it did not matter how often your browser crashes. But now that the browser is out of beta it is supposed to have all the problems fixed and actually learn to run smoothly.

Today’s release (it is the fifteenth one for the browser) is promised to go with better stability, especially for plugins, further improved speed, significantly improved management of bookmarks, additional privacy controls, and increased security.

But while the team claims they have reached the goals they had for security and performance and these goals must be enough to remove the beta tag, they still promise the work will continue as they have lots of new things to accomplish - even though they are not critical to require the product to be clearly labeled as a work in progress.

The most obvious thing the browser lacks is support of Mac platform - after all, Chrome has hardly been developed as a Windows-only product, I believe. Another important factor (something that prevents many Windows users from switching to Chrome as their main browser - even if they totally adore what they already see) is inability to support third-party extensions and plugins which seems to be a must for a Firefox user to even consider migrating.

During the first month after Chrome’s release I was watching the browser’s performance compared to other browsers very closely and I remember myself noting that usage of Google’s brand-new browser did not really grow impressively - instead it remained at a remarkably low market share after getting to 1% due to the initial interest. But of course we understood that the stability and performance of the browser made it clearly unsuitable for a prime-time promotion at that point in the browser life so it was not surprising when Google removed the Chrome download link from its main Google search page.

Now, 70 more days later Google clearly thinks that the product is ready for prime-time and I am quite sure that we will see Chrome everywhere now as Google will need to be very aggressive in promoting its own browser if it intends to play an important role in the web browsing war. And I am quite sure Google both realizes the need and will do exactly this as I don’t think they came up with an idea of a browser of their own as a toy - they certainly intended it for a fierce competition with other players in the market.

Right now Chrome’s market share is only 0.83% (according to Net Applications) which is definitely too small compared to Internet Explorer 69.77%, 20.78% of Firefox, and 7.13% for Safari. Google tells the Chrome browser already has more than 10 million active users worldwide but this still translates into a market share too low to be proud of. And Google clearly hopes that a stable version without a beta tag will be exactly what is needed to change the situation radically.

But I think Google will also employ quite a lot of its strength to promote the browser additionally - via Adsense ads, for example. I have been noticing Chrome ads on quite a number of sites - starting from YouTube where everyone is invited to see how YouTube will look like in Google’s new browser and to numerous tech blogs where Chrome appears as an AdSense ad. The funny thing about large availability of Chrome ads in AdSense is that even if a blogger writes a post bashing the new Google’s browser, it will still feature an ad inviting readers to download Google Chrome - simply because it will be considered as an ad the most relevant to the content on the page.

Finally, we should not forget Google’s idea to distribute Chrome bundled in operating systems installed on new computers delivered worldwide so the negotiations with OEM partners will be sure to begin pretty soon and we should see the first partnership announcements arriving in a matter of weeks, I think.

Now I have a feeling that this will be the most exciting competition we have seen for a while in the internet industry and definitely something worth watching. Everyone ready to support Google as an additional user (and a small point added to the market share) is invited to download the browser from Google Chrome official web site.