Google's Chrome

Google Chrome is set to be the third contender in a new round of "browser wars", competing with Microsoft's Internet Explorer and its rival Mozilla Firefox.

Chrome is touted to be faster, more stable and more secure than the alternatives and was designed specially for next-generation web content – such as video, web-based games, chat and internet banking.

Vice president of product management Sundar Pichai and engineering director Linus Upson said the company's developers had set out to "completely rethink" the concept of a web browser.

"On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple... Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better," they said in a post on Google's official blog.

The announcement comes one day after Google sent a press release about Chrome to journalists in Europe in the form of a comic book, which quickly spread online.

The 38-page comic book attempted to explain the technical concepts behind the web browser in layman terms.

"As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit 'send' a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome," Mr Pichai and Mr Upson said.

"As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available.
"We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries."

Like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome will be open source – meaning that other developers can contribute to the project or use it as a template for their own work.

Firefox is one of the most well-known examples of the open source code ideology, a principle of software development that states that the technology behind a product be made freely available and that encourages community development.

Read more at Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser
View comic at Google's Chrome

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