The Stratius Blog

What could top internet browser news on the same weekend that Google and Firefox agreed to extend their contract (accounting for over 80% of Firefox’s income streams)?

Google Blogoscoped announced that Google itself is coming out with a new type of internet browser, entitled Chrome. It will be completely open source and promising some exciting new features.

The announcement was made with a comic book produced by Google and sent out to industry folks. And here is an official post from the Google Blog.They plan to release more details tomorrow, but for now, here are the high points:

• Completely open source
• Will integrate Google Gears (open source software w/ offline access)
• Faster Javascript
• Tabs flipped to be on top of the browser

• Better auto-complete address/search bar, called an “omnibox”, that will attempt to be more intuitive and predict your search needs
• Default homepage will contain thumbnails of your 9 most frequented websites as well as recent searches, recently bookmars, and recently closed tabs

• Privacy mode for tabs, aka “porn mode”, turns off tracking and history for activities on that tab
• Better anit-malware and anit-phishing with a constantly updated lists of harmful sites and keeping tabs seperate so that whats in one tab cannot affect your machine and can be safely closed

“So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.” - Google

“We want browsers to find that sweet spot between too many features and too few, with a clean, simple, and efficient user experience.” -Google

Should be a kick in the butt for Microsoft and Mozilla to step things up for their Internet Explorer and Firefox offerings. Internet Explorer enjoys dominance of the browser market because it is shipped with every Windows machine. However, Firefox and Safari (by Apple) have been slowly gaining ground on IE. And any web developer will tell you IE is the devil. Bottom line is, Google’s new Chrome, if it is as clean and successful as most Google offerings are, should change the game completely. It will mean nothing but good things for the consumer and the open source movement as a whole.

span style=”color: #999999;”>Update: Screenshots here (not great quality, but better than none)