the Onda

Google is launching a new web browser that on the face of it seems more like a mini operating system than a traditional web browser. They believe the future of the web is applications and not pages and are thus trying to give us a better runtime for it.

As tech news go, the only surprising thing about it their de facto endorsement of Webkit over Gecko as browser guts. I have a feeling that this may be the beginning of the long slide for Firefox, but only time will tell. The only other thing worth noting is that Chrome is part browser and part rich runtime; that is, baking projects like Gears, and chromeless webapp containers (a la Fluid or Prism), along with a lightning fast Javascript VM is likely to make Chrome just as much of a Silverlight/AIR competitor as it is to make it an IE/Firefox one.

What is most fascinating about the announcement though is their hiring Scott McCloud (the guy behind Understanding Comics) to author the product literature as a comic book— an absolutely brilliant marketing move. The web experience of reading the comic book is absolutely horrendous and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why Google doesn't just provide a PDF that we could print out, but I can't say enough good stuff about the overall concept.

McCloud is a brilliant visual communicator, and this comic book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the web, or in technical writing of any kind. It reminded me of why Daniel Pink's experiment, Johnny Bunko, a career-advice book written as a manga, was so compelling.

Except that in this case McCloud has taken an even more boring subject, browsers, and has wrapped a lucid and entertaining story around it.

When we started Tabblo, my friend Jerry pointed me to Understanding Comics and said that if we were serious about visual storytelling, everyone we hired should become well acquainted with McCloud's work. Today thanks to Google, I think that a lot of people will.

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