Google Chrome - Will it whip the pants off IE / Fx? Or is this something else?

So what's Google Chrome? The folks at the big search engine company that over the last few years have released many free, "not evil" applications have added one more to the stable. Yesterday, they announced that Google would be releasing a new browser called 'Chrome'?!!

A browser??!! What on earth ?! That's the space that dominated by Internet Explorer - the ugly, slow, monstrosity from the Microsoft stable. That's also the space that the new, hip and happening new browser - Firefox was rocking in, slowly stealing market share away from Microsoft. And with Safari, Opera and several more, this isn't really the place one would think that Google would get into. Definitely not with a totally new browser of their own. I seem to recall that there were rumors on the Internet grapevine a long time ago that they might release a browser based on Firefox. That never happened. So why this gamble with a totally new browser?

I'm not an expert, but these are my musings on this question -

Google's Chrome browser has not yet been seen by anyone yet. It's due to be released in Beta format (as always with Google) sometime later today. But they put together a very helpful piece of documentation in a comic book format. This is available here ( don't expect them to retain this page for long after they release the product).

Having run through the document very quickly, a few things stuck out for me. And they make me think that Google is not getting into this space with the intention of starting a browser war. They are not coming in with the intention of socking it into Internet Explorer or to burn up Firefox's market. They are coming to build the future OS. The Web OS.

With Chrome, they have taken the first step in developing a framework within which all the future applications would work in a manner similar to the ways that today's applications work in the more familiar Microsoft Windows, but without a installed operating system. It would all be running inside a browser. No matter where you are, just fire up your browser and login with your 'OpenID' (imagine!) and you're ready to roll.

So what makes me to conclude that Google is not out to start a browser war, but something else? Chrome already talks about interacting with web content not as web pages, but as web applications. The various tasks that you do today on a Windows machine are already available web applications - Email, Chat, office Documents, Project Management, CRM (think Google Apps, Zoho, etc.).

In addition, they say that Chrome will also be making use of multiple threads for each of its tabs. In other words, each tab of the browser will be a separate process that will be running a (web) application of its own. It will take up its own share of the machine's CPU and Memory depending on the nature of the application that is running. Doesn't that already sound like the many processes that run in the shell we call 'Windows'? Or for that matter in any of the current operating systems? Google acknowledges that this approach may take up some additional resources upfront. But with the exploding processing power and bandwidth, this may be a small price.

Oh - and what's this?!! A Chrome Task Manager. LOL - now that's just like my Windows operating system. This task manager will help me to see which of my tabs (read processes) may be misbehaving chomping up my machine's RAM and by making the CPU super-busy. All in all, it sounds just like what the Task manager in Windows does too.

In conclusion - Chrome is a browser that has been written from scratch up. And from what I could make out from the comic documentation, these guys are not making nice looking, browser that will have a lower memory footprint than the current browsers, or something that may load some pages a fraction of a second faster than the others.

They are building a new machine altogether. They are clearly making the first, really big leap in the direction of making the Web Operating System that will run the myriad of web applications and will harness the power of the scattered machines connected together by a common thread - the Internet.

I'm waiting for the beta now! :)