Today Google released a sleek looking new search application for the iPad. It looks great. If you haven’t seen it yet, you may be wondering why you’d use something like that, considering Safari already includes an interface to Google search. The way I see it, this is not just about a search application. This is a trojan horse that just carried quite a chunk of Chrome into Apple’s tablet. To see what I mean, look at the official video below:
Quite a bit more than search, wouldn’t you say? Mind you, I don’t think this is a bad thing. I for one would like to see Google take a stab at a feature-complete iPad browser, even though I’ll say that mobile Safari does work pretty well. My opinion is then out of knowing how healthy competition would be this particular field.
At this point, I’m not sure any company other than Google can compete with Apple in terms of browser experience on tablets. There are other third-party iPad browsers out there (including Opera Mini - that as some might remember was, for a few years, the only mobile browser people knew), but none that really shines and takes advantage of the platform.
My hope is that Google’s own expertise in building a tablet-oriented OS in Android (and the fact that they have a great team of User Experience designers) culminates not a browser hidden behind a search app, but an actual browser that happens to do search amazingly well.