Well, it's too early to download the Gbrowser. It hasn't been released yet. How do I even know there is a Gbrowser? Let's look at some facts. First, Google is dominating on the word G. For instance, Gmail.com. It would only make sense that they register gbrowser.com if they are planing to release a browser. gbrowser.com doesn't exist, but it is already registered by Google. This in itself is not proof. I have reserved some names I may never use. The next piece of information is what catches my attention.
Browser logs over the web show a UserAgent for Google in a very small percentage. Not all sites, but mostly tech sites. UserAgents give a unique identifier for each browser and version. Your UserAgent is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4, so that's how I know you are using a browser in the family of Firefox. As a webmaster I can log this information to find out what percentage of users have your browser and version, and make appropriate changes to my sites.
Some people are seeing Google in their logs. It says "Google 0.X" listed among the other browsers, not robots, not search queries, but browsers! 0.X is the version number of beta software - software in production. So if you think these logs are mistakes, recognizing the GoogleBot instead, I don't think so. GoogleBot is at least in version 2.1. Still a chance this can be wrong.
Lead Engineer of Mozilla Firefox, Ben Goodger, is now working for Google. In January 2005 he wrote:
While I will be spending more time at Google, I will work out of the Mozilla Foundation offices regularly as the need arises.
Finally, competition is heating up already between Google and Microsoft. In many areas of online technology such as search (web and desktop) and email, Microsoft and Google are competitors. Rather than making another toolbar for Microsoft's browser, Google may be trying to get into the browser market and have full control over browser operations. (Do you know what Google AutoLink is?)
What does this all mean for me? Not so much, but I am coding browser recognition for ABS this week. The code identifies your browser and provides you with the proper code, whatever it may need to be. I have added all common browsers to the code, but it looks like I will need to add another. I also need to know the proper scripting to write in order to create bookmarks and sidebars for this possibly upcoming browser. Not to mention, I also need to make sure the CSS parses in the same way as it does in current browsers otherwise I have even more coding to do.
