I am a web developer who uses IE and Firefox. Google Chrome will do more short term damage to Firefox than to IE.
I was very excited to hear about Google Chrome the other day (surprised). I downloaded as soon as it was available and began using. It has a couple of nice features. The import tool worked well and the page rendering was solid. The V8 Javascript engine that Google built certainly makes things faster on a couple of the sites that I visit on a daily basis. There are some simple features that let you modify a form on a web page to make the chore of filling things out a bit easier (You can resize a textarea box to make things more readable).
One of the biggest reasons that I jumped on Chrome was due to the fact that each tab is in its own process and can crash without crashing the entire browser. Of all things GMail doesn’t play nice with Firefox in my setup. It will crash the entire browser. If Chrome can eliminate this, it will make my day a little more productive.
Overall, things aren’t much different than what I am used to in Firefox. By midday, I found myself with Chrome and IE open. No Firefox. Other than the plug ins that I have installed with Firefox, I didn’t miss it. I still had IE open for various reasons but my expectation is that Chrome will replace Firefox once there are sufficient plug ins to make the browser as functional.
Short term, this could put Firefox out. My guess is that Firefox will see this occur and will jump into Google’s (GOOG) arms. Google will be oh so pleased to bring that development team in house.
Long term, Chrome should be able to get some footing when the price of a Windows PC is $70 more than the price of a Google PC. Heck, the $100 PC? Give away the razor to sell the blades (give away the PC to get the Searches)?
This is an interesting play and will force MSFT to once again jump through hoops. Will Bill make a triumphant return? Did he actually ever leave?
Chrome is nice. Not ready to drop IE yet (because Microsoft doesn’t play nice with standards). I expect that the browser market in the next year will be 70% IE, 10% chrome, 12% Firefox, 8% other. We’ll see how this one plays out.