The stack of magazines has been piling up recently, but I finally made it down to the October 2008 issue of Wired, and read about the inside story of the launch of Google’s new web browser, Chrome.
The story itself is a great read, but what really jumped out at me was this:
From the beginning, the Chrome team hoped that its visual presentation would be so understated that people wouldn’t even think they were using a browser. The mantra became “Content, not chrome,” which is sort of weird given the name of the browser. (“We’ve learned to live with the irony,” Mark Larson says.)
They didn’t want to bowl people over with bells ‘n whistles. They did what they do best – keep it simple. And they realized that a Web browser is simply one more tool for delivering content – “information you share with your audience in any form, which (ideally!) provides a specific value or benefit to them.” (Presented more colorfully here.)
