Worried? Are you kidding?

I would love to compete against Google. I would pretty much beg for the opportunity to do it. Other companies are too reactive; you do something, they do something, the entire competition is just a boring back-and-forth game of mostly minor incremental improvements of dubious benefit to the end users.

But Google? Now that would be fun. A lot of fun. If you let them get ahead of you even once, you've just dramatically decreased your odds of winning, and they have an awful lot of smart people working for them. You'd have to be more nimble, and you'd have to be able to guess at what they were going to do before they did it ... and then you'd have to do it better, and do it before they do.

Beating Microsoft is like playing chess in the park. Beating Google ... that's like playing speed chess with Big Blue. It would be a blast.

I hack on Arora a cross platform WebKit based web browser. And your right, I am having a blast. I have even contributed to Chromium so I know what I am up against :) Knowing that they have a team of really smart people working full time and Arora is a few devs in their free time really does make me think about what is important.

I did realize one thing though. While Chrome can never ship with adblock, Arora can, and 0.10.0 out next week will ship with it. :D

Have you considered how blocking ads is bad for the way online services are currently monetized? I'd rather have advertisers pay for my services than have to pay for it directly. If you don't like that trade-off, why not ask sites you use to offer an ad-free paid version? It sounds like you're trying to get the best of both worlds, and it isn't sustainable.

It isn't enabled by default so users still have to turn it on at this point. AdBlock was the highest voted feature that users wanted and was the biggest feature I could include that Chrome could not. From a bang for my time/effort AdBlock was a winner.

Hallelujah! Thank you for making that leap.

I'm no longer as fond of Firefox as I once was. It has persistent memory issues, and is getting more and more bloaty. But, it's also got AB+, and that for a lot of people is a killer feature.

I think there are a bunch of sound counter-arguments to the people saying that AB+ will kill their websites: one, users are sick of websites with more advertising-related content than actual content; two, fake virus alerts and other related ads are now one of the most common vectors for new spyware and malware; three, the ad revenue model is already starting to fall over due to over saturation, and maybe it's time that website owners start looking for a better way to do it.

So, thank you. I'll be trying out the next release of Arora.

I don't think this is flexing a lot of muscle, though I could be wrong of course. The VM was written by one very talented, experienced guy and his assistant. Let's say it cost $200k. The plugin probably cost a trivial amount (there is for example an open-source IE plugin for Firefox that is pretty small sourcecode-wise: http://ietab.mozdev.org/). So all in all a small bet with a large potential upside.

I don't think the technical aspect of what they've done is flexing muscle. It's interesting for sure, but in the end, it's a plugin (a very cool one, yes).

The muscle flexing is that they're willing to subvert a competitors product instead of just promoting their own product as a superior offering.

Can you imagine the outrage if Microsoft had done this and offered a plugin to Chrome or Firefox that would make them render things just like IE does? If you're having trouble imagining such a scenario, think back to the outcry when people discovered the .Net plugin for Firefox, and that wasn't nearly as invasive.

Google is drawing a line in the sand that essentially says "You can do things your way or our way, but if you don't like our way we'll find a way to make your users do it our way."

To me that seems like a pretty serious escalation.

Nah, this is no worse than making IE skins for Firefox, which have existed for some time. The .NET Firefox plugin was significantly more invasive, since it was automatically installed without user consent. As long as this plugin is voluntary, there's nothing serious about it imo -- it's more a fun prank that people may have developed with or without Google's help.

This is just speculation, but I think it's possible somebody just did this in their free time without much strategic planning, like so many projects at Google (you know, that 20% free time at Google).

Think carefully about how much work this was to implement (well) and reconsider whether you think it could have been one person's 20% project.

I have some idea of how easy it is to embed IE into apps, so I am going to assume it's at least the same order of easiness to embed Chrome into IE. I think it's fairly trivial, though perhaps unpleasant work. I tried looking at the source code, but I don't use GIT so I gave up. It's part of Chromium: http://code.google.com/chromium/

EDIT: After considering your profile page I fold :)

He was bluffing. ;)

Again, I don't think that this is a technical thing; but a corporate strategy thing. We didn't hear about this from some developer's blog; we heard about it from an "official" Google blog. At some point, this thing has been blessed for release under the Google umbrella.