From ARSTechnica.
Is there a browser in Google's future?
Posted September 20, 2004 @ 9:45PM, by Eric Bangeman
What's next for Google after the IPO? As the pieces of the puzzle come together, it's looking like a new Google-branded web browser could be in the wings. Google has been on a hiring spree of late, and some of the new hires have interesting résumés. A few are from the Internet Explorer team. In addition, Google has hired Joe Beda, the lead developer on Avalon, Microsoft's next-generation UI, and Java guru Joshua Bloch from Sun. To add a bit of intrigue to the mix, Mozilla Developer Day was held on Google's campus in August.
Does this mean a Google-powered browser is in the offing? One clue is a whois search: looking up gbrowser.com shows that the administrative contact is Google. Along with the expertise they have hired in, there are plenty of tools to work with. Open source browser rendering engines such as KHTML (used as the basis for Konqueror, Safari, and OmniWeb) and Gecko (at the heart of the Mozilla browsers) are readily available, so creating a Google browser should be a comparatively simple task.
The larger question is one of why. Why a browser? What does Google hope to offer that isn't already extant in the web browser market? The obvious answer is linkage to other Google properties. There could be tie-ins to Gmail, Froogle, Google News, Picasa (the photo organizer), the Blogger, and other services in the offing. With G-Browser (or whatever its name may be), the surfer could get all her online business done without ever leaving the confines of the Google universe. G-Browser would be another path to the Google destination. The more people who arrive at Destination Google, the more ads served up, and the stronger Google's position becomes.
With a desktop search utility on the way, a shopping engine, news aggregator, and webmail service all in comfortable betas, it is apparent that Google aspires to be far more than the number one search engine. With US$1.67 billion in the bank from the IPO last month and its stock up nearly US$35 since then, Google has a sizable bankroll with which to work. They will likely need every bit of that full wallet as they expand the battlefront with the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL.
