Citing the increased relevance of Web Applications (an important paradigm shift from the desktop that I have argued zealously for across 9 years now and am glad to see being so important in 2008) Google is today launching a new web browser . This browser promises to be a way to "start over" in terms of creating a web browser client that can serve very effectively as a web application client. It’s based on the same open-source framework as Apple’s Safari (a little tid-bit I learned back when we began developing for iPhone). Google plans to release it fully tomorrow. If Google can convince us all to download this thing (by.. I dunno… putting a link on its ‘rarely’ visited home page or some-such tactic), this might rapidly become a widely used and useful tool. Hooray for those of us that make interesting Web Applications for a living… www.MetroPlexWebTech.com
One question: Given Google’s history of releasing things in Beta for long periods (e.g. Gmail measured beta in years), have they implemented a new strategy for releasing a web browser? And also, how does this affect/relate to Google’s relationship to Mozilla and FireFox ?