Let’s be honest, I love Google products. I would even go out on a limb to say that most of you use some type of Google product. In fact I believe I could go into any corporate environment that is not bogged down by limitations and find Google’s products installed on end-user Workstations. Google’s products are innovative and Google has a solid business model. I can’t imagine what I would do without my Google Desktop Search. I don’t delete emails in Outlook anymore, I just search for them.

With the browser wars heating up again (now that Mozilla’s Firefox is rediscovering the web and the pending release of Internet Explorer 7.0) much to the chagrin of Microsoft, Google MAY be entering the browser market. Will they or won’t they? The rumors are rampant. Imagine it…the possibility of a Google web browser based on Mozilla.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s look at the facts and then you make the call. First, Google hosted Mozilla Developer Day on their compound. Interesting. Additionally, many of Google’s tools are using JavaScript such as Gmail (web based mail) and Blogger. It only makes sense that Google develop a browser that all of its web applications can tie into. Imagine a browser that has Gmail, Google Desktop Search, Google Picasa, Google Toolbar, and Google Earth all packaged and ready to go. I like it and I believe you would as well.

Let’s now back up to the woes Microsoft has had with their antiquated Internet Explorer- is there a browser void for Google to fill? Well, IE has been given a lot of bad press and that bad press allowed Firefox to step in and capture some of Internet Explorer’s market share. Google may take advantage of this Achilles heal of Microsoft as well. If a Google browser was to be released on the Mozilla platform, watch out Microsoft; you may have quite a threat on your hands.  As popular as Google is, it would not be long before the masses went to it. Google is to technology what Nike is to tennis shoes. Home users would download it because they trust Google and I expect that the product would be just as great as all of their other products. The Enterprise would have an easy sell to upper management to adopt it if it was superior to Internet Explorer.

A couple other interesting tidbits about Google:

  • In recent news you can see that Google has hired people who formerly worked on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team and have acquired some people from Sun as well. I wonder why this is happening.
  • And do you all know what happened on April 26, 2004? Figure A should spell it out for you. Google registered gbrowser.com. I wonder why they did that.

With no real concrete evidence, it is hard to know what is really going on behind closed doors. Are they working on a browser?  I don’t know.  Honestly, the coolest possibility for me would be that I am wrong and that Google is not working on a browser;, they are working on an operating system. Could we be entering the beta stages of the changing of the guard? My eyes are wide open for that one. Are yours?