Google Chrome = Greatest Browser Yet?

September 1st, 2008 | Posted by Jeff Sauer

Leave it to Google to announce something big on Labor day and keep me working through the night. I first heard the breaking news on the Minneapolis Star Tribune, then caught wind of it on the Official Google Blog. After that, the news came from about 20 other sources on my Google Reader, I knew that I had to post about the subject of Google launching their new browser, which is named Chrome.

Several sources have already weighed in on the subject of Google’s new browser, but I thought I’d chime in my $.02 while it’s still fresh on my mind. While most of the feedback I have seen is negative, mine is overwhelmingly positive:

Google Chrome is awesome!

Being a geek, I actually read through their entire comic book announcing Google Chrome, and I found it to be quite intriguing. At the risk of getting into too much detail, the basic premise is that they are completely reinventing the browser, and doing it from scratch.

Much like Google as a company, their relative “new-ness” allows them to create things from the ground up, without much bias or legacy systems getting in the way. Rather than building on top of something based on 1990′s technology (fatally flawed technology), Google is able to create a browser from scratch and solve most of the common problems faced by the average web surfer:

Slow load times
Scripts and media hanging up the system
Rendering and caching of content
Suggestions and searches done intuitively
Tabbed based browsing and self-contained tabs (i.e. Tabs can’t harm others)
Gears for offline content consumption
Brand new Javascript rendering engine
Phishing and Malicious software guarding
Private browsing via special tab
Automatically generated home page based on most commonly used web sites

If Google can deliver on all that they have promised, then I think this will completely change the browser game. It will be tough to take away from Microsoft’s 75% market share, but this may be the browser to finally take a chunk of the market share.