How to monetize a browser (the Chrome Web Store story)
I finally understand why Google has been heavily promoting the Chrome web browser with a ton of ads. With today’s new Chrome Web Store, you can buy/access apps from any Chrome browser or Chrome OS device. This potentially makes it the most widespread environment out there, as it runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, and Chrome OS. This way, Google can incentivize developers to build and sell their apps/services through Google’s Web Store channel. Perhaps this is how you monetize a browser.
Now here is something interesting; whereas apps for iOS or Android devices have to use device-specific APIs, most of the apps on the Chrome Web Store are essentially HTML5 pages. So, the New York Times app: http://nytimes.com/chrome is actually also accessible from Firefox. So what makes the Chrome Web Store tied to Chrome and not to your online identity? What prevents Mozilla from starting their own stores? Most “Chrome Apps” will already run on Mozilla’s Firefox, so what is specific to Chrome to keep the Web Store sustainable? I think Google is banking on being the first to introduce this, and on some developers building Chrome-extensions as apps. Unfortunately I think it would be dangerous if the “Web Stores” start encouraging people to write non-standard browser-specific code.
This highlights the potential danger in this “app store” (maybe the vendor-neutral “apps bazaar” is more appropriate); if different apps are going to be locked into different browsers, then that might potentially undo all the benefit of a standardized open web that we have been striving for. I hate to think that in the future we’re going to choose browsers based on “this can run apps A,B,C while the other can run D,E,F”. The main advantage of web applications is specifically that we didn’t have to think about this. We can access our web apps using any device and any browser. Also, I do not want to see the “this site best runs on browser X” banners all over the place again, the 90s have ended damn it!
Anyway, interesting idea all in all.
Anyway, I stumbled upon 
Renato are discussing.
Renato 8:52 pm on July 22, 2010 Permalink |
That is actually a trend in nerdy webcomics: PhD comics have the “Emergency Button” below and I guess xkcd has the same. And yes, I think Abstruse Goose had some deeper hidden messages in the past. Also, I don’t see the “second hidden message”. Where is it?
hussam 8:57 pm on July 22, 2010 Permalink |
Oh thanks for telling me about that emergency button
I never saw that!
As for the Abstruse Goose messages, so the “first one” is the one you get when you hover your mouse cursor over the image (just like with xkcd). The “second one” is the actual file name for the picture itself, to see that, right click on the comic picture and select “properties” (or try to save the image somewhere and see).
For example, in today’s comic his file name says that his drawing represents how his room looks like while working, and previous messages were interesting as well