Google Goes Big in Browser Battle

Sam Gustin says: Look out, Microsoft!

Ten years after Microsoft vanquished Netscape Navigator to win the first internet browser war, the software giant faces a new challenge from arch rival Google, which is set to unveil a new web browser Tuesday.

Called Chrome--which is built on an open-source platform--Google's new browser a direct assault on an area web activity that Microsoft now controls. The long-rumored browser is the result of two years of research and development and sets out to address what Google sees as deficiencies in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which owns about 75 percent of the market.

Chrome features an enhanced browser bar, called the "Omnibox," which will offer search suggestions, highly visited websites, and other popular pages that relate to the text entered in the bar. The company says improvements in Javascript will help web pages load faster, and partitioned "tabs" will make the browser more reliable and less crash-prone.

But, as Mathew Ingram asks: Do we really need a new web browser?

Google argues that internet users now engage on a whole host of web activities--including watching video, chatting with each other, and playing web-based video games--that simply didn't exist when the first browers hit the scene.

"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," blogged two Google employees, product manager Sundar Pichai and engineering director Linus Upson. "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."

The news first leaked out after Google Blogscoped published a comic book describing Chrome the blog said it had received from Google.

For Google, the introduction of Chrome is a delicate matter because it recently extended a long-standing partnership with Mozilla's fast-growing Firefox browser. Google plans to continue to support Mozilla, according to the Wall Street Journal.