A Facebook Browser?

No I haven’t heard any rumors about it. This is just com­mon sense.

Microsoft has a browser because it’s the door out of their plat­form and if they didn’t have it, their users were going out the win­dow using the very pop­u­lar alter­na­tive: Netscape. Win­dows installed the door and made it stan­dard, sure enough peo­ple started using it.

Fire­fox came along and made the win­dow use­ful again, more safe, and for 1/5 of the Inter­net world the bet­ter choice than the door.

Google had long had rumors out there about them build­ing a new browser. As they tell it, the rumors sparked the real­iza­tion. Their bat­tle is not with Yahoo, it’s with Microsoft. If you’re read­ing this then the odds are quite good that you already have this topic cov­ered, but what Google’s doing is knock­ing a wall out of the house and show­ing you that the yard is just another room in the house.

The for­got­ten giant is Face­book. They’re build­ing their own plat­form and are now the quiet giant. Their goal is to bring you to Facebook.com and have you never leave, the chat client was the first real step towards this and office appli­ca­tions can only be so far behind. Can they risk let­ting the other two get too far ahead in the browser war too? No.

In fact I expect this blast from Google to stir up more trou­ble than just a bat­tle for IE8. As pointed out else­where, Chrome doesn’t even need a siz­able user­base, so long as it’s user­base is among it’s most faith­ful of users they have a tele­por­ta­tion pad in the liv­ing room of the house.

So what about Face­book? They’re play­ing Google’s game from the oppo­site side of the court. Even­tu­ally those two will meet and then, well then we’ll be in for a fire­works show the Inter­net has yet to see.

Then you just wait for Apple and Safari to really enter the race rather than dec­o­rate the out­side of the track.