While the world waits for Google to launch it’s new browser “Chrome” I figured I’d throw some very random thoughts around relating to today’s launch, the reasons to believe, and the predicted outcomes.

So here it is, some sort of thought explosion:

Launch/hype
The phrase “much anticipated” would be a good way to describe the launch of Chrome, except for the fact that the world was only told yesterday. So there’s been almost no room for speculation, perception formation, or hype. That said, Twitter Search’s trends have moved away from Hurrican Gustav (which dominated the trend topics yesterday morning), to a raging river of mentions of “Google Chrome” and “Chrome“. I’m pretty sure that there’s been few occurrences in the history of the internets where a “Page not found” page (http://www.google.com/chrome) has been refreshed so many times.

I’ve known for about a week that Google was to be launching something huge, my feeling is that the official announcement and launch happening so closely to each other were done so because the product is so different to what we’ve known a web browser to be. Rather than allow people’s minds to speculate and possibly write it off as just another browser, they’ve given us very little time to gather our thoughts and write it off.

- random aside: it’s an interesting contrast to the way Apple builds hype through their announcement dates and apple events.

User acceptance prediction
After seeing comments on twitter such as “just what we need, another browser”, and reading the comprehensive comic book, I think Google might have a tough time convincing users. From what it looks like, we’re going to have to approach Chrome with an open mind. We’ve been surfing the web in pretty much the same way since sometime around 1995. It’s all we know. Now Chrome comes along and wants to change the game? This might be Chrome’s biggest challenge.

Reasons to believe
To ensure success in the cloud computing space, it’s in Google’s interest to provide the best environment possible to access the applications (docs, gmail, etc) that they’ve invested so many resources into. Many people that I’ve spoken to in the past few months have complained endlessly about how slow google docs are. I think that Chrome’s javascript handling capabilities aim to deal with this by making it faster, smoother, and just less painful.

Right, there you have it. my thoughts on paper. got anything to add?