Google Takes On the Browser Market

Written by Ryan Lawler

Tuesday, September 2. 2008 at 11:55 AM EDT 4 comments

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By releasing a brand-new, open-source Web browser, Chrome, into the wild today, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is launching a frontal attack on arch-rival Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)'s share of the browser market.

In the announcement of the new browser on the Official Google Blog, the company said it was launching the new product because "we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web." The company also released a cute-ish comic book introducing the browser and all of its features.

The browser, based on Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL)'s open source WebKit, was designed with rich apps in mind, and includes multi-threaded tabbed browsing and built in an advanced JavaScript virtual machine engine -- V8 -- to power JavaScript performance. (John Paczkowski has a good run-down of the browser's features at All Things D.)

While some, like TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, see Google's Chrome as a direct challenge to Microsoft's dominance in the software market, others are a little more skeptical. KloudShare's Hank Williams notes that Microsoft's lead in the Web browser market includes 25 percent share for Internet Explorer 6 -- a browser that was first launched way back in 2001.

There are certainly a number of challenges for Google in establishing itself in the browser market, and a number of questions as well. For instance, what happens to its Mozilla relationship?

Google recently extended its relationship with Mozilla to 2011, but as Technologizer points out, there's now a question of how aggressive Google will be in supporting Firefox now that it has its own browser to promote. Even so, Mozilla CEO John Lilly tells Om Malik that he isn't worried about the new Google browser.