Google Chrome is out

Google Chrome, a new web browser – based on Apple WebKit – aimed at surfing the world wide web, has been released by Google today. Only available for Windows for now, it should be available for other plateforms such as Linux later. What is funny, in my opinion, is that normally, releasing a new web browser should have made not even a news wavelet in the IT world. But Google is releasing it, so it makes a lot of noise. It’s clear that even if they were to release a toilet bowl, that would generate a lot of press. The good news is that they are releasing this product as Open Source, because (they)”owe a great debt to many open source projects, (…) We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox” (which are open source projects). The question to Google now is: why don’t you improve Webkit and Firefox features and performance instead of releasing your own web browser? Other question: licensing. According to Wikipedia, Google Chrome is covered by BSD licensing but as far as I know, WebKit is covered by the LGPL. So, find the bug (if any). Regarding Mozilla, I don’t know enough about its licensing, so maybe it can be converted to BSD. I’ve tried to find information about source code licensing on the Chrome web site, but I couldn’t find any in 5 minutes. And by the way, why no antialiasing for text rendering? What else? Hmm… OK, we have a new web browser around there. Let’s dance.