Patent Law

Google Chrome and Apple Safari

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Chrome borrows liberally from other browsers running open-source software code, including Apple Inc. and Firefox, and Google officials said they planned to fully share Chrome code with other developers.

"We have borrowed good ideas from others," Google Vice President of Product Management Sindar Pichai said. "Our goal here was to bring our point of view, but do it in a very open way."

Because Chrome relies on Apple's open-source WebKit software for rendering Web pages, Chrome can run any application that runs on Apple's Safari Web browser, Pichai said.

"If you are a webmaster, and your site works in Apple Safari then it will work very well in Google Chrome," he said.

***Separately, note various themes in the "patent reform" debate which appear in an article on whether Google Chrome will succeed:

Jupiter Research's Elliott said: "Firefox is by all accounts a fantastic browser and still has less than 20 per cent browser share. That speaks volumes about how big an advantage Microsoft has by installing IE on PCs."

(...)

Nate Elliott, research director at analysts Jupiter Research, said: "In most cases the products that Google has delivered on its own have failed.

"To achieve success they have had to buy in services from elsewhere and not build them themselves."

(...)

David Mitchell, VP for IT research at analysts Ovum, said: "Internet Explorer is still used by about 60 to 70 per cent of people and there is a big chunk of the population who are remarkably reticent to change platform.

Full post as published by IPBiz on September 03, 2008 (boomark / email).