Now, with Google introducing a new browser to the mix it is no surprise that a new browser war has started! However this war could be a totally different one to previous battles.  Maybe Google's shiny new Chrome browser isn't part of an attempt to kill off Firefox or IE but an attempt to kill-off Windows itself.  Is that too crazy to view that their new Chrome product is an attempt to polish off their oldest rivals? May be not so crazy...

Yeah it's true, the new Google Chrome has a lot of cool features like:-

• Fast browser - Google claims that it is the fastest gun slinger in town, much faster at showing web pages than the most widely used browser in the 'World Wild West'...  Microsoft's Internet Explorer.  Google says a few milliseconds faster can make a big difference in users' engagement on the web.
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• Omnibox tool - allowing us to get a well-formatted list of sites that we've visited in the past (or possibly should have) when we type something in the address bar.
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• Incognito function - allowing us not to keep our files or web pages in the histories or in our cookies.  Once we log off from incognito no information on browsing activities are stored, an invisibility cloak specially fitted for the web I like to think.
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• Good User Interface - shows thumbnails of the nine most visited web sites along with the sites most often searched, recent bookmarks, and recently closed tabs as we start the browser.
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• Better Protection - To fight malware and phishing attempts, Chrome constantly downloads a list of harmful sites and warns you about them when you land on those websites.
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The main feature that Google Chrome has that separates it from any other browser out there, is its ability to split each browser window, or tab into its own separate process and all being managed by a lightweight 'browser' process.  In fact, don't tell anyone about this but Chrome has a built-in process manager for monitoring all of these processes, away from the clutter of Windows' own Task Manager.

So what you may say... but that makes the tabs in the browser function independent and that makes a huge difference.  For example each site can run in its own process, so that memory can be bulk-reclaimed when we navigate away from a domain or close a tab.  The task-manager-like interface provided by Google Chrome even lets you see which site is using CPU and/or RAM and how much.  In this way, web applications are treated more like normal applications!

In fact, we could be assisting here at an attempt by Google to grow browsers into decently capable application platforms almost on the scale of operating systems (Windows, Linux).

Does that mean that Google is slowly but surely working to erode Microsoft's monopoly?

If today's browsers like Chrome are capable of providing a high-quality independent platform for applications and furthermore in a way that is independent from the Operating System, we will soon see that OS vendors will gradually and naturally lose their importance.  If after some time Google Chrome prove to be working fine with web applications and remain stable , perhaps and mutter this quietly, the Operating System itself (e.g windows) will no longer have any particular importance in the desktop applications market.

Furthermore, Chrome is a open-source software and uses the same Webkit engine as Safari and Google's Android mobile platform does. That makes Google Chrome fast, very capable and essentially built for the kill.  Additionally and more importantly it is open to programmers to customise and fine-tune according to their taste or simply enhance the functionalities of the browser with new plug-ins. The possibilities are endless.

To all cynics and conspiracy theorist out there Google does allows some transparency and can re-assure those that were thinking that Google Chrome could be tracking everything and everywhere we go and then sends that information to Google...

Even if for now we can't see a conspiracy from Google, what we can see is that possibly 'Windows' days are numbered now...