Today, Google released Chrome, it’s new web browser aimed at making web applications work better.

It’s an open-source project, built on the Webkit rendering engine (which displays the page) and the new V8 javascript library (which deals with ‘behaviour’- eg. animated elements on the page, AJAX etc.)

So what does this have to do with mobile?

Well, Google’s Android mobile operating system will also use the same Webkit rendering engine and V8 Javascript library, so we can expect web pages to work in a very similar way on Chrome on the desktop as on an Android mobile.

Furthermore, Apple’s Safari web browser also uses Webkit- both the Mac and iPhone versions- so again, some consistency in behaviour on the mobile and the desktop can be expected. We already see that the mobile Safari displays pages exactly the same as the desktop version. I’ve not used it for a while, but the last time I checked, the same couldn’t be said for Pocket Internet Explorer…

All of which is a step in the right direction for the web in general; once mobile web browsers are on the same level as desktop browsers in terms of the websites that work on them, then websites can start to be designed to be optimized for the mobile- making exactly the same data accessible as on the desktop (as opposed to the tradition of stripped down WAP sites for mobile and full featured HTML sites for the desktop), but designed to make the most of the user interface- as I talked about in my last post. (Which I can’t easily post a link to from my phone…)

Which means a step towards the original vision of a hardware-agnostic, software-agnostic and browser-agnostic platform for sharing the world’s information.

I think that has to be a good thing.

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