The second browser war

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: apps”, where the apps, with a few exceptions, run on the web and are reached through a browser. So Google decided to build a browser from scratch, explicitly for those fledgling services, from word processing to snazzy virtual worlds.

Chrome, which it launched with an oh-so-Google comic book instead of a press release, is the result. It is based on tabs, each of which runs independently of the others for security, speed and stability. If one app goes down, it takes only that tab with it, not the whole browser or surfing session. Chrome even works offline. And with few menus and little visual clutter, it is simple.

This is, in short, the scenario that Microsoft has dreaded ever since Netscape. As Arnaud Weber, a Google engineer and one of the characters in the comic book, says in a speech bubble: “We’re applying the same kind of process isolation you find in modern operating systems.” It is a geek’s way of saying that developers and consumers may soon stop caring about the operating system on their own hard drive altogether.

Ingeniously, Chrome itself need not take a lot of market share to fulfil Google’s objectives. Google does not expect to sell or otherwise turn Chrome directly into money. Like Firefox’s, Chrome’s source code is free for anybody to change and improve, and even for rival browser-makers to incorporate. That could even include Microsoft. As Mr Brin says, “we would consider it a success” if the next version of IE were “built on Chrome, or even if it were just a lot better as a result of Chrome.” All Google wants is ever more people doing ever more things on the web-preferably using its own apps-and peace of mind that nobody can interrupt this. Not even Microsoft.