Google Enters the Browser Market with Open-Source "Chrome"

Update: Chrome Beta is now available for download! Get it here 

Mozilla's Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominate the browser market, and more than a handful of alternative browsers have been able to carve out a niche following. With all the competition already in place, is there room for another contender?

Google thinks so, and tomorrow will release its Google Chrome browser in beta form to more than 100 countries. The announcement comes earlier than expected thanks to a leaked comic book making the rounds on the web. In it, the characters discuss what Google Chrome purports to bring to the table.

"Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there," Google wrote on its blog. "We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. 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."

Google claims its new open-source Chrome browser will be clean and fast. To help with speed, Google says Chrome will keep each tab in an isolated "sandbox," with a separate process rendering each one. Not only should this help with performance, but if there's a bug in the code, you'll only lose one tab instead of crashing the entire browser. This also means that memory leaks can be identified and addressed by closing a single tab instead of exiting the browser.

These and all the other goodies outlined in Google's leaked cartoon all sound good on paper. Should Mozilla and Microsoft be worried?

Image Credit: Google