Google's search home page has stayed clean forever, with no clutter or advertising banners of any kind. When Chrome came out, they broke their self-imposed rule to promote their browser whenever an Internet Explorer user arrived to their page. Using their most powerful nuke—the most popular home page in the world—Google is looking to change the course of the Browser War. Now that Chrome is available for Mac, the banner has started to appear in Safari too. According to the latest statistics, their strategy is working well, growing to a 4.4% browser market share in 15 months.

Google knows they need to control the web in every sense, and Chrome is now one of the most important pieces in their strategy to keep their web stronghold. It's clearly the cornerstone of their future plans to take over the incoming new computing world—a world of smart phones and new devices that will eventually replace the computer as we know it. They are hoping the majority of those smart phones would be running Android, and tablets and computers would running ChromeOS. And rendering their web world, there will be Chrome. Not Internet Explorer, Safari/Webkit, or Firefox. Google wants to own the delivery medium, power the hardware, deploy the browser, and then control the delivery of the content. They want the whole enchilada.

That's why this is happening. Chrome will now get exposed to the hundreds of millions of people who visit Google's home page every day. Many will look at the banner and, trusting the Google brand, they will download and install it. My feeling is that many will click that big thing on the top right corner, but even if it's a small percentage of visitors, the potential for change is enormous. We will see soon how effective this campaign could be, but there's one fact that can't be denied now: This is a competitive advantage that browsers like Firefox or Opera don't have. If it ends being powerful change force, Google could eventually face an anti-trust investigation like the one Microsoft faced when they used their domination of desktop operating systems to win the Browser War 1.0 against Netscape. After all, the web is the new OS and Google owns the web.

Would Mozilla whine about this now, like they did about Microsoft? Would the Department of Justice keep an eye on this? Would the European Commission order Google to place banner's for Firefox, Opera, Safari, and, o the irony, Explorer in Google's home page, alongside Chrome's?

It's too early to tell if this is part of a long term aggressive push, but I can't wait for this clusterfuck to happen. It's going to be fun. [Silicon Alley Insider]

No, it's not Explorer. Originally, Microsoft wanted to order browsers from left to right in order of market share. That meant Explorer was going to go first, then Firefox, then Safari, Opera, and Google's Chrome. The EU objected, so Microsoft complied and offered a very reasonable solution: Alphabetical order.

That puts Apple Safari in the number one position, followed by Google Chrome, Microsoft Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. Looks good enough to me, but Jenny Boriss—a Firefox user experience designer—disagrees:

This ordering is about the worst option possible. Microsoft wrote in their proposal that 'nothing in the design and implementation of the Ballot Screen and the presentation of competing web browsers will express a bias for a Microsoft web browser or any other web browser,' but this is exactly what the current design does. Windows users presented with the current design will tend to make only two choices: IE because they are familiar with it, or Safari because it is the first item.

The disproportionate advantage to Safari is what really makes this design poor," she said, citing several studies that claim first position in a ballot gives an advantage, in part because Western voters scan from upper left to lower right when they read.

She goes on and on and on about this, but her basic message is: If Firefox is not first, this design is BAD. She timidly proposes a random order every time the selection screen opens, but she argues that this is bad because "unfortunately does not provide users with any information about what browsers are preferred" (according to who, Jenny? Maybe user would prefer Safari over Firefox—I know I do. Or maybe they would prefer Chrome if they could try it, as it seems to be a lot faster than Firefox).

Then she shows her true colors, proposing the order according to market share—what Microsoft proposed—but excluding Explorer from that ordering and leaving it to the last position. Wouldn't that be unfairly helping Firefox and putting Safari, Chrome, and Opera in a bad position? And why discriminate Microsoft Explorer too?

Finally, she also proposes probability ordering by market share excluding Internet Explorer, which again gives Firefox the advantage over the rest 50% of the time.

In other words, Microsoft and the EU should help Firefox to become the new monopolistic browser, no matter what. Jenny, please: Stop. Saying. Words. [Boriss' Blog via Computer World]

As with any marketing statement, I'd encourage people to be somewhat sceptical about large number claims. It's an interesting number and I have not seen the math [but] how many internet connected users are there? 1.1 billion, 1.5 billion, something in that area.

She described the number as "interesting math," even while that 1 billion figure includes every download and update since Firefox launched since 2004. Repeated downloads too. And people having multiple computers.

Knowing that, it doesn't seem that crazy to me. What do you think about Amy's claims? And about Firefox figure? [The Guardian]

We've posted our first impressions of Google Chrome, and after extended use most of them have held up. Chrome is fast, feature-rich and stable, not to mention highly usable. But Google's in-house innovations (the multi-threaded engine, Javascript handling and task manager, mainly) make up a tiny portion of the user experience. The rest of the interface features, usage mechanics and touted features have clear and very public parentage—in one of Chrome's four largest competitors.

Now, that's not to say that Google has explicitly "stolen" anything from IE, Firefox, Opera or Safari. They have, as of now, acknowledged that they owe a great debt to some of the other large players in the browser market. After all, they're using Safari's WebKit engine, receive billions of revenue-pumping referrals from Firefox's Google search bar, and have open-sourced much of Chrome. For most users, though, these gestures and acknowledgments will go unnoticed, and features previously incorporated into other popular browsers will be seen first on Google's. I've put together a list of some of Chrome's most interesting features, including the mainstream browsers that "inspired" them.

Feature: Incognito Mode
Who already has it: Safari, IE 8, Firefox w/ extension

Google has cleverly named and advertised this feature as a privacy and safety tool, but we know exactly what it's for. Porn Mode, as we've been calling it, is becoming de rigueur for any browser that may be used by men, which is to say, all of them except this one. It made a recent appearance in a new IE 8 beta, but it finds its roots in Safari, circa 2005, when it was called "Private Browsing." Naturally, Chrome's implementation is a bit more complete, with more complex cache and history management, as well as the ability to have normal and "Incognito" windows running at the same time.

Feature: Smart Address Bar
Who already has it: Firefox, IE 8

When Firefox 3 dropped, there was much fanfare around its so-called "Awesome Bar" which, as it turns out, is pretty awesome. Strictly speaking, Chrome's address bar is slightly smarter than Firefox's, but I would argue less useful for power users who often need to dig up specific pages out of piles and piles from the same domain. Google has also modified the concept by merging the search and address bars into one, but most other browsers have included search functionality (by default or with modifiers) in their address bars for years.

Feature: Custom Panel Start Page
Who already has it: Opera, Firefox w/ extension

This feature is perhaps the most controversial, as Opera is a commercial, closed-source browser from which Google looks to have essentially lifted one of its most advertised features. Over a year ago, Opera introduced Speed Dial, which allowed users to build customized, panel-based pages that showed up whenever a tab was created. The large thumbnails provided easy, quick navigation to oft-visited pages and were a refreshing substitute for layers and layers of menus to access favorites. Chrome's home page is dynamically generated, but clearly took conceptual and aesthetic cues from Opera.

Feature: Tab detachment/attachment
Who already has it: Opera and Safari

Chrome, to complement its separate processes for each tab, allows for easy dragging and dropping from one window to another. In other words, you can rip a tab from its parent window to become its own, then drag it back without loss of data. This makes isolating important tabs as well as maintaining single-window mode both much easier, but —you guessed it —neither feature is new. Safari includes a tear-away feature by default, complete with a snazzy animation. Opera can handle tear-aways AND reattachments, in a nearly identical manner as Chrome.

Feature: Resizable Text Boxes
Who already has it: Safari, Firefox w/ Extension

These are fantastic for anyone who creates content, whether it be full-on news stories or the odd racist blog comment. Google's version in Chrome is functionally identical to Safari's earlier version of the feature, which was recently added with version 3.

Feature: Domain Highlighting
Who already has it: IE 8

Seriously. Internet Explorer 8 isn't even out yet and Chrome has managed to crib a feature from it. When the beta was put up for download last week, we noticed that the root domain name was always highlighted, which helps users keep track of what site they're on to avoid phishing attacks with syntactically confusing URLs. Sure enough, this showed up in Chrome a week later, though there's no telling who was working on it first.

Feature: Pseudo Full screen
Where it came from: Safari

Windows browsers have often included "full screen" modes, which hide interface elements to give as much screen space as possible to content. Chrome finds a happy middle ground between everything-goes full screen and normal maximized mode with its partially, uhh, chromeless look. When maximized, the side and bottom window chrome disappears, but the top navigation and tab elements remain. This feature was found as a default first, strangely, in Safari for Windows. Sure, Safari in Windows kinda sucks (balls, and lots of them), but the slick maximized state stood out as an outstanding feature. Chrome is a marginally more attractive browser, so again, their implementation is an improvement.

As I said before, Google has taken time to acknowledge the debt it owes to other browser projects, but that will be little comfort to the Firefox, Opera, Safari and IE teams if Chrome rises to success on their features. Google has taken the best ideas from the best products, given them a new name, some new guts and a PR monsoon. And, no matter how you feel about it, they've done it well.

Google has taken many (though definitely not all) of the most compelling features from disparate sources and united them in a pretty solid package. This all-in-one approach is much like the one that Opera has taken in the past, with some success. Where Chrome trounces its competition, however, is in polish. I don't mean to say that Chrome is without bugs or room for improvement, but the user experience is fast, simple and intuitive from the start. Each of the features culled from other browsers has been refined to be more obvious, easier to use and more effective in Chrome, which—questionable ethical implications aside—is all that really matters to the end user. [Chrome on Giz]

To be fair, IE8 is still in beta, which means it isn't the full release and isn't finished yet. But since it's already at the second public beta stage, one would think it'd be at least pretty close to being complete, and it'd doubtful that such drastic changes as would be necessary to cut those numbers down will come before the full release hits.

These numbers line up with the speed tests that our cousins over at Lifehacker performed (which also included Chrome). Will Microsoft rein in IE8's bloat before its full release? If not, will that push more people to Firefox and Chrome? We'll see. [Exo.blog via Digital Daily]

To be completely honest with you guys, I did kind of download Firefox twice when I was installing it. I threw the extra .dmg file right in the trash, which obviously means they are still on 499,999,999 downloads. What the heck, what's one download between friends, apart from a heap of rice goodness? Jump in and let the Mozilla team know how much you appreciate not having to choose between IE or Safari. [Spreadfirefox]