Google's latest assault eWeapon on Microsoft's dominance

Google Inc is set to introduce Today a new Web browser designed to more quickly handle video-rich applications, posing a challenge to browsers designed originally to handle text and graphics. Google officials confirmed the news of long-rumored plans to offer its own Web browsing software, entitled Google Chrome, in a company blog post after it mistakenly mailed details of the project to a Google-watching blog, called Blogoscoped.com.

Google calls the move "a fresh take on the browser" and said it will be introducing a public trial of the Web browser for Microsoft Corp Windows users Today. The Internet search leader is also working on versions for Apple Macintosh users and for Linux devices. The launch of Chrome coincides with the recent introduction by arch-rival Microsoft of its Internet Explorer 8 last month. Internet Explorer has roughly three-quarters of the browser market, followed by Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari.

Google said its engineers had borrowed from a variety of other open-source projects, including Apple Inc's WebKit and the Mozilla Firefox open-source browser. As a result, Google plans to make all of Chrome software code open to other developers to enhance and expand too. Google Chrome promises to load pages faster and more securely, but it also includes a new engine for loading interactive JavaScript code, dubbed V8, that is designed to run the next generation of not-yet-invented Web applications.

Chrome organizes information into tabbed pages. Web programs can be launched in their own dedicated windows. It also offers a variety of features to make the browser more stable and secure, according to the Chrome Comic Book Guide by Scott McCloud. Among Chrome's features is a special privacy mode that lets users create an "incognito" window where "nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged on your computer." This is a read-only feature with access to one's bookmarks of favorite sites.

Once the Google's latest assault eWeapon on Microsoft's dominance is available for beta testing, the browser can be downloaded at http://www.google.com/chrome.