Details of the development of a new internet browser were hurriedly announced by Google yesterday after an employee “accidentally” sent a comic book about the new browser to a third party blog.

Information released by Google confirmed that the browser, called Google Chrome, represents a new generation of web browsers, as the software will have the capability to process individual scripts, pages and tabs simultaneously - what they call multiple processes - therefore speeding up the browsing experience. This is a major step forward as all other browsers process information element by element, so if an element (e.g. Javascript or a video download) freezes processing part of a script or there’s a pause in the download, other aspects of the browser can stop working. As the web moves towards greater adoption of video content and more interactive user experiences, this should make browsing considerably quicker.

The timing of this launch is even more interesting given that Microsoft has only recently launched the beta version of it’s latest incarnation of Internet Explorer, version 8, that web designers around the world are now already testing their work with.

As is usual with Google software products, the Google Chrome browser will be released as a Beta download later today, initially only for Windows users (Mac and Linux versions are in development). Surprisingly, the software will be made openly available to the open source community. What’s even more surprising is that they list the Firefox and Apple WebKit projects with credits, as portions of code from each project appear to have been re-used in the new browser.

Given how good Firefox already is, Microsoft should now have great cause for concern.

This is interesting news given that Firefox is currently one of the most stable web browsers and when combined with Chrome, these two browsers should further eat into Microsoft’s share of global web users. At present 78% of web users use Internet Explorer, though this number has been consistently dropping from a peak of 95% back in mid 2004.

I’ll post a link to the new browser download page tomorrow, but for the time being, you can read more about the new browser here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html

or for those more technically minded, you can read the full comic book here:

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

UPDATE

The new Google Chrome browser can now be downloaded from:

www.google.com/chrome

On first glance it appears to have a couple of interesting features and is quite slim and fast though no RSS feed handling yet, which given the number of blogs in existence, is quite a major missing element.

This entry was posted by Richard on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Internet News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.