San Francisco — A new superpower just entered the long-boiling browser war: Seeking to dominate not only to track what people do on the Web but how they get from site to site, Google Inc., owner of the most popular Internet search engine, today plans to unveil its own free Web browser, called “Chrome,” to challenge Microsoft Corp.
The new Web browser is intended to more speedily handle video-rich or other complex Web programs, posing a challenge to browsers designed originally to handle text and graphics and ensuring easy access to its market-leading search engine.
The Mountain View-based company took the unusual step of announcing its latest product on the Labor Day holiday after it prematurely sent out a comic book drawn up to herald the new browser’s arrival.
Google officials validated the news of long-rumored plans to offer its own Web browsing software, entitled “Google Chrome,” and in a company blog post stated that it had prematurely mailed a copy of a promotional comic book detailing plans for Chrome to a blogger. Blogoscope’s writer, Philipp Lenssen, scanned and published the 38-page comic here.
The company statement 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 on Tuesday. Details can be found here.
Google said its engineers have borrowed from a variety of other open-source projects, including Apple’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, the company said.
“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,” Google Vice President of Product Management Sindar Pichai and Engineering Director Linus Upson said in a jointly authored blog post.
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 comic book guide.
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.
“Chrome accelerates the battle between the tech giants and continues Web software’s drive to supersede the operating system.”
It is yet another attack in the company’s escalating battle with Microsoft Corp., which last week released a beta, or test, version of Internet Explorer 8 that makes it easier to block ads from Google and others. Internet Explorer controls roughly three-quarters of the browser market, followed by Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple Inc.’s Safari browsers.
The comic illustrates various Google engineers unfolding Chrome’s features, including the isolated tab idea.
“By keeping each tab in an isolated ‘sandbox’, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites,” Pichai and Upson wrote.
Having a number of tabs open in a single browser consumes more memory. If a browser is running slow, a user’s natural inclination is to close a few tabs? In some cases, however, little bits of the closed tabs remain, which eats up space and requires the operating system to grow the browser’s address space, according to Google. With Chrome, there will be a different tab for each process, including plug-ins.
“When a tab is closed in Google Chrome, you are ending the whole process,” according to the comic. “You can look under the hood with Google Chrome’s task manager to see what sites are using the most memory, downloading the most bytes and abusing your CPU” so you can place “blame where blame belongs.”
Google also promised “improved speed and responsiveness across the board.”
“We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that are not even possible in today’s browsers,” Pichai and Upson wrote.
Google is battling Microsoft for customers who use a browser for tasks such as e-mail, calendars and word processing, applications that have traditionally been handled with software stored on a computer. A Web browser could help Google lure users to its programs and search engine, said analyst Roger Kay.
“This gives Google another opportunity to protect its flank and to create a new branding position,” said Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates in Wayland, Massachusetts. “The browser is a broader platform than they currently have.”
The market for Web-based software may reach $160 billion by 2011, including revenue from advertising, Merrill Lynch & Co. said in a May report.
“The browser landscape is highly competitive,” Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, said in a statement.
“People will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, (it) puts them in control of their personal data online,” Hachamovitch said.
John Lilly, chief executive of Mozilla Corp, the organization behind the Firefox browser, said Google, which has been his non-profit organization’s biggest financial backer for several years, had recently renewed its support through 2011.
Mozilla recently introduced its own upgraded browser, Firefox 3, and has collaborated with Google on a variety of technical issues, including a system for reporting software crashes and to make software browsers more secure.
He said in a blog post that Mozilla and Google would continue to collaborate where it made sense for both organizations, but that Mozilla would also focus on its main mission of keeping the Web open and participatory by fostering its own community-developed browser and other projects.
“With IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc — there has been competition for a while now, and this increases that,” Lilly wrote in commenting on news of Google Chrome.
The browser will be available for testing on Tuesday in more than 100 countries, Mountain View, California-based Google said today in a blog post.
The browser can be downloaded at www.google.com/chrome/.