Google Chrome Announced

Apparently today will mark the launch of Google Chrome - Google's own open source web browser which purports to be lightweight with better resistance to tab crashes taking down the whole browser. This is interesting for three reasons:

• Google has put significant support into the Mozilla Foundation (home of Firefox).
• Google chose to develop their own open source browser to fix what seems to me as a quite 'small issue' - why not fix it in one of the existing open source browsers?
• The announcment echoes Google's web-app philosophy; " To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications that make up the web." which is could be an interesting look at the future of any browser wars: IE as a 'fully featured' browser, Chrome as a lightweight 'window to the web' only and Firefox and Opera somewhere in the middle (although, with all the user add-ons bloat is a severe possibility for Firefox).

All in all, there'll be a lot of talk on the web about a new browser war even though this may well be another short-term 'product to fix a problem' from Google.

(Typical Google, they launched with a comic.)


UPDATE: Ok, Chrome is fast! And on my little 12" laptop it's very nice - I can really see this as the start of a web-OS. (Oh, and all my websites work with it - yay!).