Posted by
HAZEL
December 10, 2008
Google
is taking Chrome out of Beta barely months after the its initial
release and prior to completing the plugin architecture. Is Chrome
ready for prime time or is Google giving it a nudge to grab a share of
new computer search queries?
The official release has come just over three months after the initial test release, a record pace for a Google product.
As an example, Gmail has been in Beta since April of 2004 when the
first invites started trickling out to the public. Over four years
later the Google email service shows no signs of being made official.
And why should Google make its services other than search official?
The company is constantly tinkering with new experimental features that
users are happy to tinker with whether they're official or not.
Unfortunately for fans of the company whose motto is, "Don't be
evil," the only clear motivation for the move seems to be greed.
Specifically, Google wants to own the search bar in the browsers of
laptops and PCs that are set to be released in 2009.
OEMs cannot distribute Beta software along with their shiny new
computing hardware as one of the reasons for the move and the millions
of dollars in search query revenue that Google will make from having
Chrome installed on forthcoming desktops.
The only problem that I see with taking Chrome out of Beta now is
that there are still major portions of the browser left unfinished.
Most notably Google is in the process of implementing a plugin
architecture that will allow developers to enhance the functionality of
Chrome.
Plugins represent a fairly major portion of the functionality of
most other browsers and are no small task to implement. If done poorly,
the plugin architecture is one of the areas most likely to open
security flaws and annoy users.
Chrome is an impressively fast and smooth browser for such an early
release. But let's not forget that it's still just a few months old or
pretend that it's quite ready for mass adoption.
