UH OH Microsoft!! (Google Chrome)

[zmjjmz]

The reality is, in bad economic times companies will consider alternate O/S
than to pay for Microsoft's vista, I mean windows 7 higher licensing fees. this is happening all over world. The the notion that linux has a higher cost than Microsoft is only a perception.

A lot of companies just buy/lease computers. Whoever makes and sells those computers will be in charge of putting the OS on, and they have to worry about licensing fees.

[KiwiNZ]

The reality is, in bad economic times companies will consider alternate O/S
than to pay for Microsoft's vista, I mean windows 7 higher licensing fees. this is happening all over world. The the notion that linux has a higher cost than Microsoft is only a perception.

I am an IT manager and I can assure that is not the case

[zmjjmz]

I am an IT manager and I can assure that is not the case

In addition, there generally isn't much incentive to upgrade the OS. The only situation in which I could imagine that is where you have a piece of expensive proprietary software and then the cost of the OS is nothing compared to, say, Autodesk.

[p_quarles]

The reality is, in bad economic times companies will consider alternate O/S
than to pay for Microsoft's vista, I mean windows 7 higher licensing fees. this is happening all over world. The the notion that linux has a higher cost than Microsoft is only a perception.

Well, perception isn't a bad thing. I find it rather necessary most of the time.

In some use cases, the cost of migrating to a different OS is minimal. In others, it can be enormous. Generalizing about it is dangerous, but I would say that it tends to be the case that a large corporate environment is going to incur tremendous costs (due to having to replace or rework groupware and other high-stakes custom applications) in migrating. A small business might have a proportionally smaller expense in doing the same thing.

Where computers are critical, the cost of changing anything is very high. Software licenses are a relatively negligible expense compared to setting up a network, deploying software, maintaining it (hint: if the update-manager crashes the corporate network, there's a problem), and training employees.

[wrtpeeps]

Microsoft should be looking over it's shoulder Google chrome is looming behind them and they mean business. I think this is the beginning of Microsoft downfall coupled with the world economic downturn OEM's will desperately want to cut cost and turn to linux for survival. Who would of thought it would happen this way, but it will, just my two cents.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10106174-62.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10105470-94.html

Yea, because they're going to switch to linux, and incur the cost of the problems they face during migration, staff retraining and hardware expenses, over the simple [and probably lower] cost of a new license.

[KiwiNZ]

And very favourable rates can be negotiated on the license costs

[chucky chuckaluck]

Maybe we should wait until Google Chrome actually gets out of Beta before we start speculating.

will they beat the cows back to the barn, i wonder.

[Erunno]

Why? One word: standards.

They are also pushing their non-standardized technologies like Gears.

- Why WebKit and not Gecko? Because Gecko is already a big player and most web developers are already paying attention to it.

WebKit was chosen because it was actually meant to be embedded in other products with stable embedding APIs and a relative small codebase. Gecko on the other hand is a huge and overly complex codebase (keyword: XPCOM) and has no stable embedding API to speak of. Providing one is actually one of the many goals for Gecko 2.0 [1]. The epiphany developers dropped Gecko for this very reason, i.e. because it difficult to keep up with the changes Mozilla was doing to the engine.

- Why no support for extensions? They are after IE users, not Firefox users.

An extension API is actually planned for Chrome [2]. It remains to be seen how powerful it will be. As others have already noted, an extension like Adblock Plus runs contrary to Google's business.

- Why such a wait for a Linux/OSX version? They are after Windows users, not Linux or Mac users.

Google is simply being pragmatic, OSX and especially Linux users are a minority compared to Windows' installation base. In order to quickly penetrate the market and have the widest possibly user base to test your beta product you simply aim for the majority. Plus, Chrome is deeply rooted in Windows intricacies due to their process-per-tab architecture that's why it takes so long to port it to other platforms.

- Why they're still donating millions to Mozilla? The more big players there is, the more important standards become.

Google's core business is advertising so as long as Firefox as a notably market share they will pay Mozilla for using Google as their default search engine.

- Are they supporting standards out of altruism? Of course not! They are the big name in web applications, and standards are good for web applications.

As long as implementations of standards are not bug-for-bug compatible Google will always pick certain products and versions to be supported as they already do now. Case in point: Visit Opera the Opera forums where people complain repeatedly about failing or misbehaving Google web applications.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla2:Ho...ing_API_Design

[2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10031764-92.html