One platform to rule them all

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=262565

Bruce Eckel, in this excellent piece, tells us to think of Chrome as a platform and not just as a browser. Having this platform accessible on Chrome OS, Mac OS X, Linux distributions and Windows simultaneously, allowing developers to create sandboxed applications that are automatically portable and ready to execute on all of them is the only (excellent) explanation I have read that makes sense about why Google chose to use the same name everywhere.

When Apple released Safari for Windows, they said it was to allow people to test web applications they develop for the iPhone(and iPod touch) on Mac OS X and Windows. Though it gave us a good idea about application behaviour on MobileSafari, the experience wasn’t even close to what it really looked like on MobileSafari. Chrome is different in this respect, from the very beginning. People can use it to develop web applications for desktop computers on desktop computers. Fonts and window managers may make it look slightly different, but the experience will be close to identical.

(via Ankur Sethi)