Google just released Chrome, their take on the browser. Chrome was greeted as Google's attempt to challenge Microsoft in the browser wars. But that's a distinct misunderstanding of Google's expectations.
Chrome has been designed by Google as an application that supports the new tools and functionality that companies will be building into the internet in the coming years. The current browsers by and large are not equipped for the speed and bandwidth that will be required.
Chrome has been built from the ground up to handle the new web.Google has endowed Chrome with a new java script program that allows for much faster data transfers.
Since cloud computing will offer users the opportunity to trust sensitive materials to remote servers, Chrome has greatly increased browser security by putting each browser tab in it's own sandbox. Rogue code is confined and cannot spread to to other applications.
In the cloud environment one might have several browser windows open at the same time. Chrome is designed so that a crash in one tab will not affect the other tabs. Goodbye to the blue screen of death.
But Chrome's spare and utilitarian interface will probably not appeal to mainstream users. And it's not intended to. Google is not trying to compete with IE or Firefox for users. In fact Chrome is open source. Google will be happy if Microsoft or Mozilla "stole" all of it's code. Google is trying to make sure that the plumbing of the Internet is sufficiently robust for the kind of products that they will be producing in the future.
Products like Google Docs will compete with Microsoft Office. That's where the battlle will be.
