07 September 2008

How Chrome Puts The Skids Under Nokia?
What Does Chrome Mean For The Mobile Web?

As many of you might have already know, Google has decided the world needs yet another WebKit based browser, the same open source foundation that Konqueror and Safari are built on top of.

Google's new Chrome browser is the desktop browser but I guess that this technology will make its way to Android soon or later and the main question is how Chrome puts the skids under Symbian and Nokia’s WebKit based browser fro S60 devices?!?

How good is Chrome after all? How does it will be different from the Nokia’s WebKit based browser or from some less popular, but yet important browsers like Opera’s mobile and upcoming SkyFire!?

Well, I've just found an intrensting article at the Register, here is the short preview and whole article is definitely worth reading

A headache for Nokia

But what about Gears as a credible mobile development API? Google doesn't need Android to succeed to make money. What it needs is a widely adopted platform to deploy its services, and a platform which provides a good user experience and some place to stick adverts. Android feels like a backup plan - a seed for the market sponsored by Google, rather than core business.

I recently wrote about the problem facing Google in getting its applications onto Nokia's phones, since Nokia is unlikely to release its own WebKit-based browser with Gears support. Google has announced Mobile Gears for Windows Mobile, but that only addresses a tiny fragment of the market. Not only does it cost a lot of money to run a service over many incompatible handsets, but technically it’s a tricky job.

But Gears poses potentially greater problems for Nokia. As I see it, Nokia's rebranding as a services company puts some of its services in direct competition with Google. It's not in Nokia's best interests to allow a Google Gears plug-in for its WebKit-based browser.

If the Chrome browser is made available as a S60 download, then Google Mail and other applications will come with offline support as standard, and provide a uniform platform for Google to deploy their services on desktop and mobile.

Nokia has much to lose due to its "service company" aspirations if Gears runs across multiple handsets. Once you have a single sign-on to services from Google, it means that the barrier is lowered for existing subscribers to try out new services. You can’t really make users on mobile type in their email address, password and memorable phrase each time.

The problem for Nokia is that Google is a much stronger service brand, associated with search, mail, maps, even calendar. I can certainly see why Nokia would prefer to go down the silverlight/widget route rather then opening up the browser