Google is going to get into the business that, five years ago, you would have thought was dead as a dodo, not worth doing, over: browsers.
It's working on Chrome, a new browser based on Webkit, the open-source rendering engine that was adopted by Apple (which also vacuumed up Dave Hyatt from the KDE Mozilla project [thanks NeilTurner in comments]) for its Safari browser back in, gosh, January 2003. (Firefox didn't happen until 2004.)
The explanation is given in cartoon form, drawn by Scott McCloud (whose style reminds me a bit of Art Speigelman's Maus).
I have to say, it's rather smart doing it in comic form. I doubt anyone but the nerdiest would bother to read it in word form. In cartoons, the story can be told in a way that people might stick with. (Tell us in what ways it's a distortion, of course.)
The Blogoscoped server is a bit stressed, so you could read the short version here.
Anyhow, if you've got the patience while the pages load, Chrome is promised to be a browser which will separate each tab into an independent process, so that the ones which chew up memory and process time can be identified; which won't suffer memory leaks (at least, not that will kill your memory); will have a compiling Javascript engine, rather than an interpreter as used by every other browser. There's all sorts of other promises - stability, speed - and Google does have lots of stored sites to test it on.
One interesting point: the default page will be a group of your nine most-visited pages. Just make sure it's something you can show your mum - though there is a setting for an "incognito" tab: what happens there, stays there.
That doesn't mean though that it won't go to beta. Apparently it can't be automatically tested on password-protected sites... so there's still a role for humans.
So what's the point? To get Google in front of more people. To track us. To take share away from Microsoft - and if Google can translate its search share into browser share, Microsoft may have cause to feel its collar concernedly.
Your guesses please for when Chrome will emerge from beta. (Note: Google Mail, introduced in 2004, is still officially in beta.)
