I believe "chrome" has meant "the GUI of an application" for a very long time. I think it predates mozilla, but I could be mistaken.

You're not mistaken. We were calling it chrome since the Xerox 8010 Information System.

In case I wasn't clear, I meant that _Google's_ choice of browser name was confusing, given that it was an already-existing term.

I knew what you meant.

Yeah, I was annoyed with Google when they announced Chrome because I thought it would cause some confusing collisions for the technical crowd down the road. I really would have liked to see them choose a different name for their browser. The interface and trappings of the browser has long been called "chrome" by Mozilla, so if you see chrome given in a non-proper-noun context then it probably refers to that, not Google's competing browser.

Google seems to be making a habit of that... Closure and Noop are two other examples that come to mind.

Dont' forget "Go"

Actually, do forget it.

I don't think Google is intentionally taking already-used names. There are only so many good project names.

The confusion caused by naming a browser "Chrome" would have been really obvious to anyone involved in browser hacking.

The lead frontend engineer on Chrome was previously the lead frontend engineer on Firefox, and many other people on the team worked on browsers forever - we all knew what 'chrome' meant in a technical context long before we called it that.

But we still liked 'Chrome' more than the other names, and our motto is "content, not Chrome", which neatly works with either capitalization.

Doctype is another. And has nothing to do with mark-up validation or schema.

Their attack on Google can always be titled Less Chrome.

I remember rummaging through Mozilla projects source code and seen this name there quite a long time ago.