For a long time, I really wanted to get into Linux. I wanted it to be my operating system of choice and I wanted to support the ideals that open source software stood for. But frankly, at the time every major distribution didn't make it practical enough for me to do. It seemed like spread out between all of them were the necessary features for any useful PC user, and despite so many of them working toward the same thing, all of them lacked some basic things expected from any viable desktop OS.

One of the major selling points of developing OSS is that you have a TON of people all working toward some goal, and when one person develops a quality implementation of a feature, everyone then benefits. So why was it that despite popular distributions numbering in the double-digits, no one had produced something as basic (albeit certainly not simple) as the functionality BulletproofX, which has been around in Windows since what? '95?

My theory is that when so many people are in a room where there's a big, ugly piece of code that needs to be written, and there are a hundred other skilled programmers in that room aside from themselves, everyone waits for someone else to do it. Everyone wants to be working on the new, revolutionary piece of code, or the piece of code that'll add some glitzy eye-candy.

And this is where I come to the topic of this entry: what will the fate of open source browsers be following the introduction of Chrome?

Prior to Chrome, Firefox has been enjoying a steady rise in popularity and adoption, taking a noticeable bite of IE's marketshare, and an even more significant portion users that realize they have a choice in browsers (as evidenced by available statistics from websites frequented by this demographic; i.e. Slashdot, Digg, etc). Being the only major open source browser anyone really cares about, they are the major innovators and implementors when there's a new idea in the world of web surfing.

With a heavyweight like Google entering the playing field, I have very high hopes for innovation. They're known for going out of their way to do things differently, and whether or not that results in a successful browser, I have no doubt that the open source community will be richer for their contributions. I'm glad that this is already how they've come out from day 1 with the browser, that its intention is to be a "next-generation browser" built from the ground up, as opposed to the others like Safari, IE, and FF - all built on much older platforms slowly being upgraded.

My only fear is that Chrome muddies the waters and attention that was previously given to FF is now split with Chrome, and both browsers end up somewhere lost in the sea of mediocrity that was once a mainstay of the Desktop Linux environment.