The last couple days of one million monkeys furiously typing has yielded a lot of speculation about the potential for a Google branded browser. I have to say that my interest was instantly piqued although, thinking about it in retrospect, I’m not really sure why. The Google name obviously brings with it a fair amount of credibility and the often cited technology salon style of development is lauded with equal frequency. Gmail has been incredibly successful for a beta and held everyone’s attention for a couple of weeks and is sort of being used as the example for the potential success of a Gbrowser.

Gmail was a pretty straightforward proposition. Give people a belligerent amount of email storage with a search capability that actually works baked in and you’ve got a pack of believers. That isn’t a particularly difficult problem to hunt down and tackle. The browser issue is an answer to a problem that I don’t particularly see. I’m all for the idea of funding even more R + D for Mozilla but I can’t see the actual product in my mind or how it might differ from the furious development already going on around Mozilla or, more specifically, around Firefox. What are the actual enhancements and pitfalls? I’m having a hard time conceptualizing what kind of overhaul the browser needs at this point.

A couple things that I can think of immediately:

1. Integrating Gmail with Thunderbird would be a fine start although it technically isn’t a ‘browser’ question. Given Google’s reluctance to let folks tinker much with Gmail transport this would be a fine opportunity for Google to tie POP/IMAP capability in with a browser. I personally think this is a horrible idea but inappropriately tying services together is one of the roomier and more comfy fish bicycles for web development so I wouldn’t be surprised.

2. XUL applications on parade. Obviously lending the monolithic ‘G’ to the XUL interface would lead more developers to at least look into what you can do with XUL outside the web browser and spur some development. The downside is that spy ware is probably the next item in line here. Installing XUL applications and extensions has become much easier over the past year or so. I don’t even want to think about that a whole lot more. The use and potential extension of XUL gives a whole lot more weight to the Google OS meme that’s been thrown around over the past few months as well.

3. Google desktop. This is an extension of the above and a skinnier version of the Google OS. You don’t really need an operating system but a desktop environment for most users wouldn’t really need to consist of much more than a browser, editor, and mail client. Google has all of those in essence and seems sensible enough to avoid the abysmal failures of 3D interfaces and whatnot that all of the marginal players have been pitching in various forms. Imagine this on a Linux platform with some crappy commercial Linux vendor in partnership and that Linux desktop argument becomes vastly simplified for many users. Maybe.

Thinking it through a little more I starting to buy into Kottke’s Google OS idea a bit more than I did initially. Watching Google morph from a search entity into whatever it is that they’re turning into is a fascinating process and gives more than enough fodder for lunatic in the street speculation. I’m also curious what other evidence will surface about this or whether Google will eventually bow to public pressure and give some official statement or what not. In the mean time, you can get yourself a copy of Gbrowser for Mac OS X right now. Oh what an unfortunate convergence in bad naming schemes. So, am I completely wrong here?