Since I downloaded and started using Chrome yesterday, I have had to rediscover the world of online advertising. Using Firefox and Adblock Plus for nearly three years has shielded from their existence for the most part.

Stephen Noble, in a post on the Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals, seems to discover that Chrome will be a source for injecting greater personalization and targeting into the online advertising market.

This is the key reason Chrome exists, right now.

While their may be discussions about the online platform and hosted applications, there are only a small percentage of Internet users who rely on hosted desktop-like applications, excluding email, in their daily work and life.

However, Google’s biggest money-making ventures are advertising and search. With control of AdSense and DoubleClick, there is no doubt that Google controls a vast majority of the targeted and contextual advertising market, around the world.

One of the greatest threats to this money-making is a lack of control of the platform through which ads are delivered. There is talk of IE8 blocking ads (well, non-Microsoft ads anyway), and one of the more popular extensions for Firefox is Adblock Plus. While Safari doesn’t have this ability natively built in, it can be supported by any number of applications that, in the name of Internet security, filter and block online advertisers using end-user proxies.

This threat to Google’s core revenue source was not ignored in the development of Chrome. One of the options is the use of DNS pre-fetching. Now I haven’t thrown up a packet sniffer, but what’s to prevent a part of the pre-fetching algorithm to go beyond DNS for certain content, and pre-fetch the whole object, so that the ads load really fast, and in that way are seen as less intrusive.

Ok, so I am noted for having a paraoid streak.

However, using the fastest rendering engine and a rocket-ship fast Javascript VM is not only good for the new generation of online Web applications, but plays right into the hands of improved ad-delivery.

So, while Chrome is being hailed as the first Web application environment, it is very much a context Web advertising environment as well.

It’s how it was built.

Tags: Adblock, Adblock Plus, ads, adsense, advertising, advertising environment, Chrome, context Web, contextual advertising, DNS, doubleclick, Firefox, Forrester, Google, hosted desktop-like applications, IE8, Internet Explorer 8, Internet security, Internet users, Javascript, Microsoft, online advertisers using end-user proxies, online advertising, online advertising market, online platform, online Web applications, pre-fetching algorithm, Safari, search ads, Stephen Noble, targeted advertising, targeted and contextual advertising market, Web application environment

So, Microsoft is releasing Internet Explorer 8 later this year, and a Beta is available now.

The question is, are you ready for it?

Internally, the tech savvy folks (myself included) have been tossing around the football of how to tackle it. The leap from 2 to 6 connections per host, on top of the basic rendering challenges that come with any new browser release are enough to make a Web team’s collective hive mind melt.

So, the bright team at Gomez are developing an IE 8 readiness kit.

Sounds like a great idea.

Why do you need to be concerned at a network level?

Let’s see…Well, while 6 simultaneous connections may be faster for clients, what happens to the TCP stacks of the devices that handle all of these connections, especially as more and more people start using IE 8?

Imagine that every Firefox user is using FasterFox, and then IE 8 comes along.

Do you have enough TCP sockets?

How quickly are sockets that are ready to be recycled actually recycled?

Are you really ready?

Tags: IE8, Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft, MSIE8, performance, sockets, TCP, Web team