Google Enters Browser Wars with Google Chrome

(Image above from Valleywag here.)

Forget Hurricane Gustav. A new storm is about to blow through, in the online world at least.

Google Blogoscoped today has a solid scoop on the long-rumored, finally-happening Google browser, called Chrome. It’s set to launch in beta tomorrow, Windows only, at this now-empty URL. And you can bet most geeks can’t wait to get their hands on it.

Philipp Lenssen’s scoop forced Google’s hand, so they blog about Chrome here:

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Google has released a comic book here that gives an overview of Chrome. And Valleywag has screenshots here, and Chrome looks every bit as elegant and intuitive as you’d expect from Google, where simplicity is the watchword. Some cool features, as oulined by Blogoscoped:

• Google Chrome will use special tabs. Instead of traditional tabs like those seen in Firefox, Chrome puts the tab buttons on the upper side of the window, not below the address bar.
• The browser has an address bar with auto-completion features. Called ’omnibox’, Google says it offers search suggestions, top pages you’ve visited, pages you didn’t visit but which are popular [and] more. [This is similar to the new Firefox address bar - LT]
• As a default homepage Chrome presents you with a kind of “speed dial” feature, similar to the one of Opera. On that page you will see your most visited webpages as 9 screenshot thumbnails. To the side, you will also see a couple of your recent searches and your recently bookmarked pages, as well as recently closed tabs.

(TechCrunch has more of an overview here.)

As Blogoscoped points out, the Google browser has been rumored before. And it makes complete sense. Look at Google’s suite of products, and it’s clear that the Web is the new operating system, soon to make all other hard-drive-based operating systems obsolete. Why buy that expensive Microsoft Office software when you can use Google Docs for free, and store all your information online for easy access anywhere?

TechCrunch makes that point here, noting that while Chrome is obvs. another shot across the bow at Internet Explorer, it’s really a full-on challenge to the Windows OS:

Expect to see millions of web devices, even desktop web devices, in the coming years that completely strip out the Windows layer and use the browser as the only operating system the user needs. That was going to happen anyway, but Chrome + Gears just made the decision a whole lot easier for hardware manufacturers to make.

This is where we’re heading.

It also makes sense that Google, the world’s No. 1 point of entry to the World Wide Web, wants to have more control of the browser through which we access it. But doing this, it can craft a tool optimized to deliver the Google Web directly to users in new and different ways.

Google puts it this way:

Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

With Firefox’s excellent new browser just released, Windows putting Explorer 8 out in beta, Apple’s Safari making strides via the iPhone and others like Flock and Opera doing their thing, it’s clear the browser wars are back in full swing.

It’ll be interesting to see how it stacks up vs. Firefox, which has done the most in recent years to eat away at IE’s market share. Firefox broke download records with its recent release – 8 million downloads in 24 hours. Will Google threaten its status as the world’s No. 2 browser? I think the answer is “no question.”

More

Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows killer (TechCrunch)

News conference Tuesday

The Associated Press on Google Chrome

Information Week says this solves the GreenBorder mystery

BBC: How much market share can Chrome capture, and what does this mean for Firefox?

Financial Times: Google’s most direct attack yet on Microsoft

PC Magazine: Don’t get caught in the hype