In its most aggressive attack on Microsoft to date, inside sources with knowledge of the Chrome project said that Google is preparing to unveil its brand new browser for download as early as TODAY to try and loosen Microsoft’s stranglehold on the most vital piece of navigating software for the internet.
Google has constantly been trying to get more wallet share from Microsoft’s pocket by developing small-scale web-based applications to compete with the very dominant Microsoft Office portfolio (Word, Excel, and the like) but has been rather unsuccessful in breaking that barrier. But with this unprecedented move, which sources say have been rumored since ’04, Google Chrome is unleashing an attack on Microsoft’s huge Internet Explorer browser market which surveys put at around 75%.
To combat Microsoft IE’s dominance in recent years, Google has been backing Mozilla’s Firefox browser, which
grew out of the ashes of the once-powerful, now-irrelevant Netscape browser. It has now grown to an astonishing 18% of the market! Google pays Mozilla royalties for Google ad clicks that come from Firefox searches. But clearly, Mozilla’s efforts were not enough for Google, and seemed like a “delaying” tactic they had to employ to bide time for the release of its own browser. This is very significant as their core business is internet-based and what it lies on is not its own browser! Thus with the current beta release of Chrome, Google is declaring the browser critical and vital to its future, and in that regard, it is entirely right.
The efforts to do this have been well known within the company for a long time, and finally it has been launched and released today! 
I would expect it to be somewhat similar to what Mozilla Firefox did for version 3.0 when they launched Mid-June with a record-setting 8.3 million downloads in 24 hours, but it was pretty quiet and certainly not to the extent of that Firefox launch. But I was hoping it would be something less mediocre than blog announcements and hush hush word of mouth rumors. One thing is for sure though, Chrome has been unleashed!
All Things Digital: Boomtown released a bunch of comic strips explaining a few technical aspects of the up and coming open-source browser, while Google Blogoscope has released an overview of some features of the browser, all seemingly coming from improvements and related plug-ins from the browser it is supporting currently, which is Mozilla Firefox 3. I’m pretty excited to see what Google is going to come up with, so I’m going to download the browser right now. The download link is available below for those who want to do the same.
Related Articles:
Google Chrome Download Page
Technologizer: Ten Questions about Google Chrome
docstoc: Google Chrome Comic Book Download
