A potential Google competitor candidate 2009

Google is the giant of the Internet, especially on search and online advertisment. If you ask me who is the potential candidate to compete with Google? I will say, is not Yahoo!, is not Alibaba, but is Apple.

Why not Microsoft? Microsoft is another IT giant, Microsoft can compete with anyone. It will not inspire you.

Google is a service provider on the Internet, but it also an Internet media company. Apple is a hardware, a software or an entertainment related company by selling iPod and mp3 songs. How could these two companies could compete with each other?

Google is good in search, and Apple is developing its search technology as well. Apple add in spotlight technology in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, it is a search function, not just to help user to look for a data file on the hard disk, but it can help user access to application easily, by 'searching' it.

The different is Google search the Internet, Apple spotlight search your desktop. This is not all the truth, as you know Google Desktop application search your desktop too. Is hard to avoid competition these day.

Searching is just a start. Browser application lead me to relate Apple as the potential competitor of Google.

Google search already dominate the Internet, if it can control the software platform like Microsoft does, that will be great. Google's answer for the software platform is browser--Chrome.

Google Chrome is an innovative browser, it not just render html real fast, its new v8 javascript engine performance out do all browsers available on the market. Since new web application depends heavily on javascript, an efficient javascript engine is crucial for a browser.

Apple release Safari 4.0 beta public few days ago.
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Apple develop browser application many years ago, way before Google does. The first Safari browser was release in year 2003. Recently Apple release Safari 4.0 beta public, is surprisingly fast on javascript performance (test by Sun Spider and V8) , it is the only javascript engine which can compete with Chrome in terms of speed.

Chrome and Safari share the same html engine, WebKit. It is one of the fastest html render engine in the market now. WebKit is modified from an open source html engine, khtml from KDE project. WebKit is open source as well, Google take the engine to build Chrome and added in with their v8 javascript engine.

Is too early to say that Apple will compete with Google with its new Safari browser, it is just a beta version and javascript engine is not the only thing that we are looking for in a browser, but I think Apple is a potential competitor.