Who Google Chrome Affects the Most: Adobe
I see a lot of coverage of the new browser out by Google – Chrome. And rightly there should be – this is pretty exciting stuff! Javascript running on it’s own thread per tab? Sweet!
I’ve also seen a lot of “Should Mozilla be pissed?” or “How will this affect Microsoft?” etc. But I haven’t seen a lot of coverage on who I think is affected most by this move: Adobe. Why? Because the whole concept behid Chrome is to spead up web applications, namely Google’s style of web applications which all happen to be using AJAX instead of Flash.
So, if Google has completely revamped it’s javascript engine in Chrome so that each tab operates javascript in it’s own thread, and you can run AJAX applications like google docs, gmail, etc. continuously without worrying about your browser bringing down your entire computer, we’re likely to see a renewed interest in AJAX as a platform. Also, we’ll see a renewed effort from other browser vendors to make their javascript engines comparible. This is all bad news for Adobe Flex/Flash.
How are you, as a web developer, going to build that next business app? Using Adobe’s Flex/Flash platform that requires users have a plugin installed (although most do) but has all the limitations of Adobe’s Flash plugin running in the browser? Why would you when for most business applications, AJAX can meet all your needs AND be optimized to run as well as desktop applications?
No matter what the outcome, it’ll definitely be fun to see how this plays out!
Oh, and I’m writing this blog post through Chrome – it’s so new and shiny, go get it now!
Update: Chrome doesn’t have to gain huge market share for this scenario to play out!
Chrome is open source and hence their Javascript Engine is open source! (http://chromium.org) So, Chrome doesn’t have to make a huge dent in market share to make a huge dent in how the other browsers support javascript and AJAX apps.
From limited testing over about 2-3 hours I could noticeably tell a difference in performance running Gmail, Google Docs, Google analytics, and google reader in separate tabs as opposed to doing this on firefox.
This tells me that their javascript engine technology is superior to others out there – and since it is open source, I can imagine a scenario where other browsers, especially mozilla, adopt this engine.
So, google chrome may never ever gain market share but I’m willing to bet their javascript technology will! This is what bodes poorly for Adobe in my opinion – a new browser market that isn’t dominated by Chrome per se, but is dominated by fast and multi-threaded javascript engines!