Microsoft has announced a milestone with its Office Live Workspace product: It’s scored its millionth user. And the company has announced the product will be out of beta this year.

Yay, Microsoft. Now go back and build the service we want, please.

There are people who say that Office Live is a Google Docs competitor. It certainly could be, someday, and I’d like to see that. But it’s not right now. What it is right now is a way for people who have paid for the Microsoft Office suite to share files with other people who have the suite. It’s useful, but it’s no Google Docs, nor Zoho for that matter.

Those other productivity suites are a) free, and b) browser-based. They don’t require that you pay for and then install software on your PC.

As ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley writes, Microsoft believes that users don’t want to create big files and documents “on the Web.” Maybe that’s because they can’t.

Offlice Live does have its own text editor, but it’s rather weak and doesn’t have Google Docs’ killer feature: simultaneous editing. If someone edits a document you’ve got open and you then try to save it, you get a conflict error and have to decide whose edits you want to kill.

I believe Microsoft could make an honest Google Docs competitor without killing its Microsoft Office business. Eventually, Microsoft will have to. So it might be smart for Microsoft to encourage people to start thinking about the company as an expansive supplier of productivity solutions–desktop and Web-based–rather than just a company that makes desktop office products that, by the way, also have some add-on Web support.

Tidbit: Office Live Workspace works nicely in Internet Explorer and also in Firefox. But you get a blocking error page if you try to use it in Google Chrome.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–One of Firefox’s initial claims to fame is the fact that the browser can be extended with a multitude of plug-ins, and even though Microsoft caught up with Internet Explorer, Firefox still has an extension edge over Google’s new Chrome Web browser.

Google's Sundar Pichai speaks at the Chrome launch.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

For now.

“We don’t have that in the beta today, but we definitely plan an extension API,” or application programming interface, Sundar Pichai, a Google vice president of product management, said at the Chrome launch event here Tuesday. “It is one of the things we will get to next.”

Firefox extensions cover a wide swath of abilities, from synchronizing bookmarks to debugging Web site performance to showing detailed exposure data for online photographs. The extensibility has attracted scads of programmers, too, which is strategically important for most computing efforts.

Google, no doubt, envies the Firefox extension assets. But it’s hard to imagine the company mustering much enthusiasm for one of the most popular Firefox extensions, AdBlock Plus, which suppresses many advertisements.

Google has a strong focus on giving Web users a good experience–indeed, it said its studies show that users find the text ads placed next to search results an overall improvement. But Google’s business depends on advertising, and its $3.1 billion DoubleClick acquisition is geared to give the company strength in just the sort of online display advertisements that AdBlock is designed to counteract.

Extensions shouldn’t be confused with a related technology, plug-ins, which includes software such as Sun Microsystems’ Java, Microsoft’s Silverlight, and Adobe Systems’ Flash. Existing plug-ins work in Chrome, Pichai said.

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

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Many stories focus on what Google Chrome means for Microsoft, Firefox, and the fate of the current online world. But what does it mean for up-and-coming Web start-ups? Here are six implications for the start-up world that I can see. These assume that Chrome lives up to its hype. That’s a big if.

1. Chrome is to current browsers what Windows was to DOS. Twenty-three years ago Microsoft started its march from being just another software company to being, well, Microsoft. It did this by offering order in a fragmented world. Back then, you couldn’t just run an app on your personal computer. There were dozens of OSes, all doing basically the same thing, just a little differently. If you wrote an app, you’d have to cater to not just OS, but sometimes to each version of an OS. Sound familiar?

Google, both for monetary and ideological reasons, aims to make Chrome the standardized operating system for Web apps–and to make Web apps indistinguishable from native desktop apps. That means Chrome will let you turn any Web app into something you can reach from your Start Menu, Dock or desktop. It means Chrome is taking on the key jobs of the OS, like partitioning memory and managing application processes. It means if people use Chrome as a platform they’ll get–Google says–huge, noticeable advantages like an end to worrying about the viruses and malware that use the Web as their primary means of infection.

The biggest hindrance to Web apps today are other Web apps that crash the browser. Google means to put a stop to this, and Chrome’s featureset and priorities align toward this objective.

2. Chrome rebuilds JavaScript from the ground up. The key chokepoint of the modern Web app is JavaScript. Originally little more than a way to play cute little sounds, JavaScript is pushed to the limits via Ajax programming techniques and the host of excellent JavaScript libraries like prototype, script.aculo.us, and extjs.

But after 13 years, the JavaScript interpreters built into browsers are way past their prime. They can’t carry the load and leak memory like sieves. Off in Denmark, Google has been building V8, a new from-the-ground-up JavaScript interpreter that’s built into Chrome and available under its own open-source license.

What does this mean? Take the online video revolution that advertisers are in heat over. It might be helpful if the underlying browser displaying the video, and the main interface language that accesses it, is based on current computer science rather than state of the art in 1992.

3. There’s a new sheriff in town: Google. How many times has some crappy JavaScript function, plug-in or giant image choked your browser to death? Chrome is designed not only to sandbox misbehaving code, but to make it easy for users to see who’s to blame. Chrome comes with its own task manager, and bandwidth malefactors will be called out of hiding.Chrome will be setting a very, very high expectation: if you use Chrome, Google in effect is saying, viruses, spyware, malware, keyloggers, and phishing will be trapped in their sandboxes. Given that the Net is the primary vector of infection today, Google is taking on the evildoers of the Net. As well as the current police force; Chrome could very swiftly adversely impact the business of every “anti” software vendor very quickly.

4. Google to closed social networks: Drop dead. How long before Google extends Chrome so as you surf the Web, you can connect with your friends looking at the same sites as you at the same time? How long before Google pulls together the strands of its social network initiatives (everything from Google Share to its growing support of OpenID to Google Talk’s instant-messaging functionality in Gmail) into one unified, Chrome-ified, service that anyone can use?

5. Chrome Extension API is coming. Get ready. Firefox’s huge extension “ecosystem” has been important to its adoption. While the beta released today doesn’t support extensions, that is definitely on the road map. Best to keep an eye on Chromium, the online home of the open-source project emitting Chrome.

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

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Last week Jeff Barr from Amazon Web services came up with a great new term to describe the need to handle sudden and extreme spikes in demand by enabling a hybrid cloud computing model which combines both private data center resources and remote cloud resources such as Amazon Ec2. He called this model “cloudbursting”…

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Google Chrome is an open-source browser developed by Google using existing WebKit rendering engine (the one used in Apple’s Safari browser) and its own Google Gears technology for offline use of supported web applications. The browser developed by Google is described by the company as something of a new generation of browser - the one working mainly with rich interactive applications instead of simple text pages of the past. The browser has launched as a Windows-only beta version with versions for Mac and Linux claimed to be in the works.

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This should, in no way, be considered an official review–see CNET and CNET News for the proper shebang. I’ve just been using Chrome for a few hours and thought I’d dash off some quick thoughts.

First: It is fast as you-know-what. It feels super-responsive, so much so that I first thought it must be a trick. The tabs almost seem to click themselves; the autocomplete is so speedy that I thought it was reading my mind. After download and launch, it pulled in not only my bookmarks but, apparently, also my Awesome Bar history. Once I loaded it up and typed “T,” Twitter.com was almost already loaded in the tab. It was slightly terrifying, actually. One note: Chrome did not import my Firefox Live Bookmarks–the RSS feeds that appear in a drop-down from the menu bar, and it sadly doesn’t have this as a feature at all.

The “tabs-on-top” interface is actually a tiny bit off-putting at first. I’m so used to tabs being below the URL bar that I initially felt confused about which ones I had opened. Also, there are no traditional menus for…well, anything. There’s almost no text whatsoever at the top of the browser window. No File, Edit, View, Tools, etc. You’ve got a wrench for the very minimal selection of customization settings and a button to the left of that where you access the menu items you normally find in “File,” “Edit,” and “Tools,” along with a Developer option where you’ll find Chrome’s Windows-style Task manager (and a JavaScript debugger and console, which I think I might really need…see below).

There’s not even a separate search bar; you conduct everything from the URL bar. I did discover that the Ctrl-K keyboard shortcut that normally puts your cursor in the search bar in Firefox adds a little question mark to the Chrome URL bar, so the browser knows for sure that you’re conducting a search. But it’s not really necessary. If you type anything but a URL into the URL bar, Chrome does a search. I like it, but it takes a little getting used to.

Now for the negatives. In my short use, I found that Chrome’s got some problems playing nice with JavaScript–or at least, I’m assuming that’s the problem. A Safari user told me he’s encountered some of the same issues I had, so I suspect it’s related to the open-source WebKit on which both browsers are based (and some quick searching seems to bear that out).

Among the issues I ran into today: I attempted to sign up for Hallmark.com to send an e-card. The site launches its sign-in window as a JavaScript pop-up. Once I’d registered and tried to sign in via the pop-up, the window got caught in an infinite refresh loop. I couldn’t keep my cursor in the text field or type. Sorry, Hallmark! On Facebook, as I attempted to page through an album, I got about eight photos in, and then, as I clicked Next, the page would display the next photo, then immediately jump back to the previous one, and it wouldn’t progress any more than that. Finally, as I attempted to sign in to Hipster Cards (I need to send an e-card today!), that site’s online form failed me at the Captcha field: every time I tried to click in it, the cursor leaped out and plopped itself back in the “First name” field. Firefox to the rescue.

I thought maybe Chrome was trying to tell me something about the e-card sites, but then, as I searched for an answer to the WebKit/JavaScript problem, I got this error on a result page:

So, that’s pretty terrifying, and I guess as security features go, it’s hard to miss. Hopefully it’s not a false positive. In any case, like I said, I haven’t done exhaustive testing on Chrome, and I haven’t yet tested it with Google Docs or other Web-based Google apps. But at first blush, I like the speed, but it’s certainly not ready to be my daily browser. At least not if my mom ever hopes to get an anniversary e-card.

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Google's Chrome gets a 78 out of 100 on the Acid3 test

Google’s Chrome browser is outperforming the latest “stable” builds of both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 in the popular Acid3 test. The Acid test, for those who do not know, tests how well a browser complies with a given set of Web standards. While all three browsers pass the Acid2 test, Chrome currently clocks in at 78 out of 100 on Acid3, while Firefox and IE7 stand at 71 and 14 respectively. The only release quality build to beat Chrome is Opera, which scores an 83.

Even though Google has the stable builds edged out, we have to remember that Chrome is still in development, where it is topped by a number of other “unstable,” development builds, including Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 (85), Opera (91), and Safari 4 (100). It is interesting that the Safari 4 Developer Preview performs so much better than Chrome, given that they are both built on Apple’s WebKit framework.

Whenever a new browser or an update to a browser is released, one of the first things that techies tend to look at is how it fares on the Acid test. The latest iteration of the test, Acid3, is the hardest yet and no “stable” browser builds have achieved a 100 out of 100 on the test, although the Safari 4 Developer Preview has.

Passing the Acid3 test is an important goal for browser developers and it’s great to see that Chrome is performing so well on its first attempt.

Update:
A reader, Benjamin, writes in saying that under Vista SP1, Chrome shows scores ranging from 74 to 79 on the Acid3 test. Running it again right now, the test showed a score of a 79. Some of the initial variability could have been due to the servers for the Acid3 test being hammered as a result of Chrome’s release.

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