The Google Chrome Effect

Google's new beta browser Chrome is rapidly gathering early adopters, so I thought I'd briefly look at how the new browser will effect Datalink websites and applications.

I've had a good chance to look at Chrome and review it in a bit of detail.  Chrome appears to be built for the mobile platform, with alight, speedy interface which is not processor intensive and theusability is more suited to smaller screens.

We don't currently test for Google Chrome as part of our browser testing, although we do test for Safari.  Why is this significant ?  Well both appear to use a similar graphics engine, based on the open source Webkit.

Our websites use standards based technologies, so they will mostly still look good in Chrome.  We're yet to see what sort of sophisticated design features it supports, but for now you won't notice too many differences.

One area that is effected by Chrome, like Safari, is Freestyler CMS editing.  Freestyler's rich text editor currently does not support Safari.  But this isn't anything too major, as a whole range of other applications, such as Blogger and the like also don't.  We may well support Chrome editing in future.

Google Chrome is currently a fad which is caught up in the buzz and hype of all new Google products, however we'd expect that once it is released that this new browser will quickly gain marketshare. 

So we are keeping an eye on it.  However long-term, unless something drastic happens, our focus for cross-browser support will be on the dominant browsers in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox which combined still account for over 90% of the web browser marketplace.