Orangeman Burns - Sriram Sridharan's Blog

Google managed to steal the march on the IT news press by announcing its forthcoming new browser whilst the US was busy celebrating Labor Day. As the rest of the world was scratching around for news because the US was shut, Google could be guaranteed to get lots of attention worldwide for its announcement. The free browser, called Chrome, is supposed to be available for downloading today for computers running on various versions of Windows.

Chrome has more tools for Web surfers to cloak their online preferences, creating a shield that could make it more difficult for Google and other marketing networks to figure out which ads are most likely to appeal to which individuals. Having had a look at it there is not much difference between Chrome and all the other browsers out there and time will tell where its security holes are.

Google's also launched a 38 page comic strip, prematurely leaking the launch of the new browser. Philipp Lenssen had scanned the comic book to a digital format and Mike Linksvayer converted it to a PDF format. Thanks guys!!

Seems like Google is one way or another becoming a rival to most of the Web startups. I guess we'll be seeing the Chrome browser on Android and on other mobile platforms as well, like Opera Mini and FireFox's Minimo. Open Source support is a good thing, but what remains to be seen is the huge user popularity and add-ons enjoyed by Mozilla.