Chrome and why Gates was right to be paranoid

When I first heard that Google was going to create its own web browser alternative, the first word that sprung to mind was “why?” As many bloggers and journalists have noted, the web browser market has grown rather crowded of late, turning what many had assumed was a market permanently dominated by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer into one where Microsoft faces real competition. It certainly has caused Microsoft to “jump,” however much the slow and languid fashion software goliaths move can be called “jumping.”

But then, I thought about it a bit more. Many years ago, when flannel was the hippest of hip couture and venture capitalists were discovering how much fun it was to dump gobs of cash down Bay-area wells, there was a runtime created by a company that was making all sorts of money selling UNIX servers to companies who had just discovered this newly popular communications technology called “The Internet.” That company was Sun Microsystems, and the runtime, of course, was Java.

Java’s promise, at the time, was that it could create a software layer that abstracted away ideosyncracies of platforms. Software, in other words, wouldn’t care anymore whether the customer used Windows or a Mac or Linux or Sun’s Solaris. Sun angled to get its runtime onto as many computers as possible, and hoped to inspire waves of developers to write to Java APIs rather than the API unique to a particular platform.

Java applets were Java’s nod towards the browser environment, acting as safe “plugins” which provided more functionality than the basic HTML tools available to browsers of the time. Clearly, though, the central thrust of the Java environment was towards applications that ran OUTSIDE the browser.

In hindsight, that wasn’t such a great idea, as the browser has evolved into THE runtime. Bill Gates, in other words, was right to be paranoid. Most people spend 90% of their time in front of their computer interacting with the Internet by way of a browser. The browser, in other words, is the runtime.