Google's New Web Browser - Chrome

Google launched a free Web browser called Chrome. The new browser will challenge Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Firefox browser. The new browser is available to download for free in more than 100 countries. Chrome is Google's next step to become the leader in all Internet areas.

According to Rory Cellan-Jones article, ‘Chrome - first impressions’, “The first thing you see when you open the browser is a clutch of snapshots of some of your favourite websites, garnered from your search history. Click and you go straight to them. There's also a box enabling you to search your web history. But it's the address bar which is intended to do much of the heavy lifting. Start typing in the box- and it begins to offer suggested URLs or offer web searches. Google seems pretty excited about this - but to my eyes it looked much like Firefox's "Awesome Bar". As with all new browsers, tabs are an important feature, though Google is claiming its tabs are extra special. They each feature the address bar, and they're designed so that if a site crashes in one tab, it doesn't bring down the whole browser, a policy Google calls "kill the tab, not the browser". Privacy is now a growing concern for many web users, and Chrome has an "Incognito" mode, which means that if your partner comes to the computer after you've been using it, they will not see which sites you have visited. Used on Google's network, Chrome did appear to load pages very quickly and efficiently - and if those who install the beta (only for Windows right now) experience similar speeds, then it could gain quite a following.”

Microsoft welcomed the new browser and expressed confidence that people will continue using Explorer. “The browser landscape is highly competitive,” said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of the Internet Explorer group. “But people will choose Internet Explorer for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online.” After Microsoft introduced IE 7 in 2006, Google complained that the browser’s search box favored Microsoft’s search service. Microsoft Internet Explorer is the leading browser since the company won the battle in the 1990s against Netscape. Microsoft still holds 80% of the browser market, Firefox 19% percent, and Apple’s Safari 6%.

According to John Lilly, chief executive of Mozilla, given the increasing importance of the browser and its widening competition with Microsoft, Google’s entry into the market is not surprising.

According to Google’s Web site post, by Sundar Pichai, an engineering director and vice president for product management, "Chrome is designed for speed and ease of use. We were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex Web applications much better. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of Web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.”

According to the New York Times "Chrome is based on an open-source rendering engine, WebKit, and an open-source version of Google’s Gears technology. Chrome will also be able to run in a privacy mode, InCognito, so that no information about a person’s browsing is collected".