Cocoa Geek

Google has developed a web browser. Lets face it no one is really surprised, there have been rumours of this for months and with the impending release of Android i don’t suppose that an increased level of web integration on mobile devices and the desktop from google is any shock either.

I do however find it very interesting that they have chosen to use webkit as the back end for the browser as opposed to gecko. Google has long funded mozilla and therefore the gecko platform, webkit however was a fork of the knoqueror browsers KHTML by apple. Apple prefers open source projects it works on and with to be under a BSD style license in order that the code can be used in close source applications, this is a possibility for using webkit over gecko.

Ultimately googles choice of rendering engine has little impact on the success of their browser, the usability and compliance with the web-applicatios that people use will be far and away more important in the success or faliure of Chrome.