Google is preparing to launch an open-source internet browser, dubbed Chrome, to compete with IE, Firefox, Safari and even Microsoft’s operating system. “Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast,” explains the official post announcing Chrome, which is slated to launch sometime today. “We were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better.” Google says it realized it needed to completely rethink the browser and build it from scratch. “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.”
Says one analyst: “This is the potential threat that Microsoft has been worried about since the 1990s,” he said. “You’ve got web apps running inside isolated processes. It really sounds a lot like Google trying to take the web application model and make it more viable as a replacement for the desktop PC application model. This is Google trying to really push applications to the web and make that the way people do computing.”
ZDNet: Will Google’s Chrome be a death blow to Firefox?
Update: Chrome now available for download here.  Have you tried it?  Let us know what you think in comments below…
