How many people will Google Chrome annoy? - TechRadar UK

Let's count the number of enemies Google might make with its new Google Chrome web browser.

(It's hard to tell with Google how much is coolly considered strategy and how much is the company hyperactively jumping from one interesting idea to another, but let's count 'em up anyway.)

Microsoft

A pretty obvious choice, given Microsoft's Google paranoia. It will see the browser as a threat to Internet Explorer, a way of promoting and improving the delivery of Google's other services, and ultimately another reason not to buy a Windows PC.

The last thing Microsoft wants is Google in a PC's application folder, attacking Microsoft from above AND below.

Mozilla

Mozilla makes most of its money from Google, via the search bar on the Firefox browser window. Every copy of Chrome that Google shifts is potentially a copy less of Firefox that users will use to access Google.

Fewer Firefox users means less funding from Google, plus the awareness of a new and voracious competitor in the room. Even though Google has its best open source face on, how will the community react to that?

Big ad supported websites

Chrome apparently has a feature that displays your nine most recently visited sites with search boxes for each. That's good for users but not perhaps so good for websites.

Google has already started including search boxes in its search results, for bigger sites. This has caused some angst as it means Google's ads get served against resulting pages, rather than the site's own, potentially reducing one of the few sources of funding available to a website.

Moving this feature up into the browser history window/search bar is going to be controversial.