Google Chrome. It’s a browser that was admittedly still in the development oven when Google released it, so are Internet Explorer 8-killer comments premature? Some analysts think so.
On Tuesday, Google launched its latest innovation: a new open-source browser intended to create a better Web experience. Chrome is now available in more than 40 languages for the Windows operating system.
Flanked by promises on one side and hype on the other, Chrome took one percent of the global browser market within a day of launch, according to Web traffic-analysis company StatCounter.
“This is a phenomenal performance,” said Aodhan Cullen of StatCounter. “This is war on Microsoft, but the big loser could be Firefox.” StatCounter’s analysis also revealed that Internet Explorer holds 70 percent of the global browser market, followed by Firefox with 22 percent.
A New Approach To Browsing?
Firefox isn’t worried, according to blog posts from Mozilla’s CEO welcoming Chrome to the competitive browser landscape. Chrome does offer some new takes on the browsing experience. Chrome combines the search and address bar, and when users open a new tab they’ll see a page that includes snapshots of their most-visited sites, recent searches, and bookmarks.
What’s more, each browser tab operates as a separate process. By isolating tabs, Google said, if one tab crashes or misbehaves, the others remain stable and users can continue working without having to restart the browser. Google also built a new JavaScript engine, V8, which not only speeds up Web applications but enables a whole new class of applications that can’t run in other browsers, according to the search titan.
“While we see this as a fundamental shift in the way people think about browsers, we realize that we couldn’t have created Google Chrome on our own,” said Linus Upson, director of engineering at Google. “Google Chrome was built upon other…