Left Flank

I downloaded Google Chrome as backup browser on my Windows XP SP3 with Firefox 3.0,2 browser at home. I played with Google Chrome for a few minutes and it looks very fast with a clean interface. I'll definitely consider it before I fall back on IE7, or even Flock. Still, I've used Firefox since version 0.7, and I'm hooked now. I'm in no way knowledgeable about software, but Firefox and its open source, DIY approach, prompted me to learn what little I do know now.

According to The Economist, Chrome and Firefox are cousins ganging up on IE7.

As Google rose to dominate the web during this decade, it therefore invested a lot of energy into a rival web browser to IE, called Firefox. An open-source project (whose code can be altered by anybody), Firefox comes from a foundation, across the street from Google's offices, that happens to be based on the remnants of the old Netscape. Google's engineers contribute code to Firefox and pay the foundation a share of advertising when people search Google in the browser's toolbar. Thus Firefox rose to become the largest browser after IE, with almost 20% of the market.

But Google concluded that even Firefox could not protect it against Microsoft. It began to define its business as «search, ads and apps», where the apps (applications), with a few exceptions, run on the web and are accessed through a browser. So Google decided to build a browser from scratch, explicitly for those fledgling services, from word processing to snazzy virtual worlds.

Chrome, which it launched with a cheeky comic book instead of a press release, is the result. It is based on tabs, each of which runs independently of the others for security, speed and stability. It even works offline. It is, in short, the scenario that Microsoft has dreaded ever since Netscape. As Arnaud Weber, a Google engineer and one of the characters in the comic book, says in a speech bubble: «We're applying the same kind of process isolation you find in modern operating systems.» It is a geek's way of saying that developers and consumers may soon stop caring about the operating system on their own hard drive altogether.

Ingeniously, Chrome itself need not take a lot of market share to fulfil Google's objectives. Google does not expect to sell or otherwise «monetise» Chrome directly. Like Firefox's, Chrome's source code is free for anybody to change and improve, and even for rival browser-makers to incorporate. That could even include Microsoft. As Mr Brin says, «we would consider it a success» if the next version of IE were «built on Chrome, or even if it were just a lot better as a result of Chrome.» Google wants ever more people doing ever more things on the web, and peace of mind that nobody, not even Microsoft, can interrupt that.

But that won't happen in ROK, where American imperialism is suspect, but Microsoft is king.

Most Korean Internet sites are reliant on Active-X, a program used to install software components on Web pages to enable particular functions, which can run on IE only.

This means that users of Chrome, or any other non-Microsoft browser like Firefox, would experience trouble logging in to e-mail accounts, be prevented from online transactions like banking and credit-card purchases, and even stopped from downloading officials documents on the country's e-government site (www.egov.go.kr), which only functions on IE.

When tested on popular portals such as Naver (www.naver.com) or Daum (www.daum.net), Chrome was quick to load the main pages. However, the log-in security programs on the sties, which are installed through Active-X, didn't function.

The sites of major Korean banks such as Kookmin and Woori didn't function normally on Chrome either. Accessing the e-government site with the Google browser and the user is left with a message declaring «install control for Macintosh user.»

However, Google is not intending to miss out on the Korean market and said it is planning to make Active-X operate on Chrome for a designated number of Korean sties.

The company is currently making a ``white list'' of major Korean sites that would be accessible on Chrome despite their reliance on Active-X, although that would certainly raise some eyebrows among supporters of the open-source movement.

I ran into similar problems when I wanted Ubuntu loaded on this computer, and trying to accommodate my wife's unfettered use of Korean sites is a headache. Honestly, all the hype about broadband penetration retards competition. Most of that penetration is in the form of computer cafes, not household PCs. Most of those pipes are clogged with gamers. The rest of the problem are these banks and other businesses, which frankly I don't trust enough to use, even with IE7.

My point is, the problem has nothing to do with the average end-user, but with business and corporations trying to curtail access to their markets to foreign, and domestic open-source, access. It might take years, but Goggle should just bypass ROK, and make South Koreans beg for consideration later.

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