It’s been an exciting ten months since the search giant Google made its long-awaited foray into Web browsers and is already heading towards online dominance. The news of Chrome’s release were in for quite some time and the reigning browser giants such as IE and Firefox were waiting in a restless anticipation, though seeming quite composed. “Chrome was inevitable,” said Mozilla CEO John Lilly matter-of-factly. "It should come as no real surprise that Google has done something here: their business is the Web, and they've got clear opinions on how things should be," Lilly had written in his blog. Lilly knew better than us that Google Chrome was sure to become an obvious alternative to Firefox for those Web surfers fed up with Microsoft's long-reigning Internet Explorer browser.

“Launch early and iterate” is a popular saying at Google which the Chrome’s launch didn’t fail to follow. “We hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome,” said the Google people on the browser’s release. Ever since the “send” button was hit, Chrome has elbowed its way into the browsing arena which had long been dominated by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer having lately been joined by Mozilla’s Firefox. Given Google’s reputation as the most powerful search engine, spreading the word about the search giant’s upcoming browser came as a breeze. People having waited excitedly for the browser didn’t take long to switch to Google Chrome. And luckily for Google, they were not disappointed.

Since the browser’s launch, several close comparisons between the three leading browsers have been made. Chrome, Firefox and IE have been tested and compared on four grounds that include usability, expandability, performance, and fighting evil. In these early tests, Chrome beat the two for usability and performance, but the winners for expandability and fighting evil were Firefox and IE8 respectively. But since “launch early and iterate” is a phenomenon continually in practice at Google, many subsequent iterations to Chrome followed enabling the browser to outdo IE and Firefox in all areas.

The role of browsers today is way more than just loading the text-based pages. Google Chrome was designed for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. It is fast, lightweight getting you onto the web in a jiff. Google knew that the needs of today’s internet users are speed and simplicity, not the visual appeal and graphics. So Google Chrome’s interface design was kept minimal to stay out of your way and instantly take you where you want to go on the web. Going back to the basics also includes designing of a powerful underlying security architecture of the browser so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates.

The latest industry news reveals that IE continues to fall and Chrome’s popularity is increasing by leaps and bounds. The graph below show IE’s sharp fall and Chrome’s fast rise.

As the need of the time requires browsers to act more like operating systems with all of the plug-ins and other things that are now done inside a browser, the term ‘browser’ itself has become an extremely broad concept."It just shows the word browser has become a truly meaningless word," says Bill Gates about the browser’s role as an OS. "What's a browser? What's not a browser? If you're playing a movie, is that a browser or not a browser? If you're doing annotations, is that a browser? If you're editing text, is that a browser or not a browser? In large part, it's more an abuse of terminology than a real change." Ironically, Gates’ comments appear to be supportive of Google’s upcoming operating system Google Chrome OS. Although Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer belittles Google Chrome OS by saying "who knows what this thing is?" it’s quite hard to believe he doesn’t actually care about it.