Gyaan Sutra On entrepreneurship and technology

Google Chrome is the hot new browser which has taken the tech world by storm. Nobody can keep their mouth shut about it yet. Every tom, dick and harry has posted their opinion on the brand new slick browser by the ‘almost evil’ Google.

I like the new toy, and have been wasting a lot of time on it. One day I will post about websites which blow the crap out of browsers and why Mozilla can sometimes take up 1.5GB of memory and 150% CPU on my machine. As John Resig put it beautifully - The blame of bad performance or memory consumption no longer lies with the browser but with the site.

Infact, as soon as Plugin development starts, the first thing that will come out is a recommendation engine which which show you an alert when you load a website with really slow performance, and then show you advertisements for alternatives. Any guesses on who might make it?

Anyways, this 0.2 release has put me to shame. I have never written any software which was so great when it was at version 0.2. The only problem I face with Chrome is that I can’t run it on Ubuntu and if I need to use Firebug, Firecookie or FirePHP (which is like more than half the day), I need to go back to Firefox.

But the one single reason that I am very excited about is that it will get Google Gears into mainstream. I have been doing a lot of hacking on Gears for quite sometime but never put it too much time because it was never really that big. Except for a few techies, I don’t know anybody else around me who uses it (I’m in Pune, India). And here in India, there are scores of web development companies who have never heard of it.

But Google has played an old card here again. Just like they made Google Talk popular by plugging it into the massively popular Orkut and Gmail, they have bundled Gears with Chrome. Thousands of Indian software engineers started using Gtalk because that thing was right there - next to the email and on orkut. In a few months, it replaced Yahoo Messenger as the default IM application.

And now that Google is pushing chrome and gears on their homepage, it just means that thousands of people will now have Gears on their machine. If only your website asks for permission to load gears, who knows how many people can get blazing fast access to your services. And 99% would not know why your page loads and executes so fast. Talk about a competitive advantage.

Over the last one week, ~6% of the people who have come on this blog (a majority is from India) are using Chrome. This means that 6% of the people have gears installed on their machines.

This is BIG.

In just one more year, you would feel outdated if your site does not use Google Gears. And I’m sure there are a lot of you who wouldn’t want to get stuck in a situation like that.

If your company is planning to get your websites to use google gears and are looking for some help, do let us know. We would be more than happy to get involved.