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

As a Web performance consultant, I view the release of Google Chrome with slightly different eyes than many. And one of the items that I look for is how the browser will affect performance, especially perceived performance on the end-user desktop.

One thing I have been able to determine is that the use of WebKit will effectively rule out (to the best of my knowledge) the availability of HTTP Pipelining in the browser.

HTTP Pipelining is the ability, defined in RFC 2616, to request multiple HTTP objects simultaneously across an open TCP connection, and then handle their downloads using the features built into the HTTP/1.1 specifications.

I had an Apple employee in a class I taught a few months back confirm that Safari (which is built on WebKit) cannot use HTTP Pipeling for reason that are known only to the OS and TCP stack developers at Apple.

Now, if the team at Google has found a way to circumvent this problem, I will be impressed.

Tags: Apple, Chrome, Google, Google Chrome, HTTP pipelining, pipelining, Safari, WebKit

Om Malik points out a potential threat to blogs: OSX 10.4 “Tiger”. The new Safari that ships with this OS comes with the RSS reader turned on by default!

That upgrade while great for the consumers, could come as a big shocker for those blogs whose feeds are included as part of Safari’s default starter package. Infact it could be the biggest stress test for RSS thus far!

Most RSS readers are set to poll for updates every hour, and imagine when half-a-million Tiger Safari users who start hitting a server at the same time, pulling down RSS updates, because they have not changed the default settings. Server meltdown? Or an unintended denial of service? Apple says that most of the default feeds are going to be major news sites like CNN. New York Times, and LA Times. At this time they are not including any personal blogs as part of the default list. Even for them it is not going to be easy.

As a Web performance geek, I ask you: do you measure and monitor the performance and availability of your blog infrastructure?

Didn’t think so….

Enjoy the Weekend!

Tags: app, Apple, bandwidth, blog, EAD, feeds, GigaOm, HTTP, IM, IP, it, LA Times, Malik, Om, Om Malik, performance, personal, RSS, Safari, server, update, users, web, Web Performance

This is the Browser Percentage breakdown for The Newest Industry over past 30 days.

This is a part of an ongoing series inspired by the browser percentage graph at ongoing.

The sudden shift upward on the part of Gecko and Safari browsers comes from the site being Scobelized on Saturday, March 19, 2005.

Tags: browser, HTTP, IE, IM, it, media, Newest Industry, Om, PHP, Safari

Looks like Firefox could become the genesis of the private-label browser, unencumbered by nasty platform/OS/Service Pack limitations. [here -- courtesy of the XSLT:General blog]

I believe strenously that Microsoft has committed a serious error in limiting the upcoming MSIE 7 update to Windows XP SP2 machines. It will not drive the large corporate IT departments who still use Windows 2000 to upgrade. It will increase resentment towards the company, which will be actively commented on in places (such as here).

I use Windows XP SP2. But as you see from the sub-title of this blog, the next computer I will buy for myself is going to be a Macintosh Powerbook. And I will run Safari, Firefox, Camino, and (very, very occasionally) fire up some 6 year-old, badly maintained version of MSIE for MacOSX.

When I use Windows, I will use MSIE to compare the look and feel of the pages I build. And nothing more.

If Microsoft wanted this new browser to be a true update, and not simply an addition to their program of forced obsolescence, they would have made it free of OS restrictions. What Microsoft has said is that if you don’t run Windows XP SP2, your browsing experience will be sub-optimal, less secure, and unsupported.

Web designers, this means that you will have to have yet another platform to test your Web designs, as MSIE 5.5, 6.0, and 7.0 will all interpret CSS, CSS2 and other design features differently.

So, what is the big deal about MSEI 7.0? It shows the Web community that Microsoft has still not learned the lesson that Firefox is teaching: be everywhere. Microsoft, the OS is not the platform of the future; the browser is the platform of the future. And a browser that can run anywhere, anytime, in any language, on any hardware, will win.

Tags: blog, book, browser, browser war, community, corporate, cro, css, design, Firefox, HTML, HTTP, IE, IM, it, LAN, Mac, maintain, Microsoft, MSIE, Om, Pages, pr, run, Safari, update, web, Web community, Web design, Web designers, window, Windows