Today, Laurie Sullivan over at MediaPost’s Online Media Daily discusses how Google is educating the world about Chrome. It’s a small step in a much bigger effort.

Whatbrowser.org is a simple site defining the most important application on the computer. It generously makes the major browsers available from the site, and has links to tests that I’m not sure really further the knowledge of browsers.

This is all nice, but the rest of the story is the overall push that Chrome is making to gain market share. Google is proceeding in a systematic way as hey are also buying the default placement on PC-OEM machines and offering customization via themes.

Switching is a fairly high barrier, so the default placement on the PC-OEMs will provide a big lift for Chrome. Customization has proven to be another tool that overcomes satisfaction with the norm. We’ve seen Firefox penetration double on our partner sites after they’ve launched a branded browser Boom!. That’s despite the requirement of going off to Mozilla to download Firefox first.

Given these steps, is Brand Thunder releasing a Chrome Boom!? Not yet. For a small company, efforts have to be focused. That focus has been on refining the custom browser experience on Firefox and extending the product to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (see our IE beta story here). The market share of Chrome doesn’t warrant our full attention.

Does this put Chrome on the product road map? You bet. Google is taking the necessary steps to ensure Chrome has a meaningful presence, and that has ensured companies like ours are moving from interest to action.

Tags: brand thunder, Branded Browser, browser boom, custom browser, firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, MediaPost, Microsoft, Mozilla Firefox | Posted in News