Google Chrome: Product Strategy Execution

When Google released Chrome in 2008, the expressed purpose was not necessarily to create a dominant browser, but rather to rouse the slow-moving browser industry and advance the state of the art. For a company that traffics in browser-based products, better browsers lead to happier customers.

It is absolutely incredible to see how well Google has executed against this ambitious strategy.

Browser adoption of new technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and WebGL has never happened faster, and all the major browsers are constantly one-upping each other on benchmarks like JavaScript execution speed.

This is primarily due to Chrome applying pressure to innovate. The browser wars are unmistakably back on

Perhaps most impressively, Chrome has, as Jeff Atwood put it, transcended version numbers. I'm a big advocate fast development cycles and frequent releases and it's here where Chrome's impact can be most obviously seen. Firefox has announced they will be releasing their browser more frequently and IE seems to be accelerating as well.

I put together this chart that shows the number of elapsed months since each major release of Firefox and Internet Explorer. The horizontal axis is actually concrete releases, rather than time, but I've aligned releases of each browser as carefully as possible and you can certainly get the idea.

You can see a recent marked acceleration in release cycle by both FF and IE. One data point does not a trend make, but I expect to see this continue and would not be surprised to see Firefox or IE adopt an automatic update process akin to Chrome's. I'm all for SaaS-like updates to thick applications.

Source data for generating the above graph can be found here.