By Janie Christine Octia
INQUIRER.net
SINGAPORE – Google Chrome is meant to provide users a choice, an executive said.
“The biggest challenge for us is that users don’t realize they have a choice when it comes to browsers. If there is a competition, this will help improve the available browsers in the market. Our goal is to provide more choice for users, less problems for developers and grow the over-all market” said Linus Upson, Director of Engineering, Google Inc, in a briefing here.
Google launched on Wednesday Google Chrome, an open source-based web browser that aims to compete head-on with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox.
Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer at Microsoft Corp., in an e-mailed statement to INQUIRER.net, declared: “The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online.”
Available in more than 40 languages including Filipino, Google Chrome was released as a beta product now available for free for Windows-based users.
Chrome will be available for Mac and Linux users in the coming months, Google executives said.
With the goal of improving user’s experience, Chrome included an interface called the “Omnibox,” which works as the URL, search and history box. It also suggests frequently visited sites, while providing Google’s own popular query whenever a keyword is typed in the box.
Chrome also introduced the “Incognito” feature, which allows users to browse a website without leaving any trace on the site visited, including username and passwords.
Google Chrome uses a JavaScript engine called V8 that speeds up current web applications and enables a whole new set of web applications that could not exist on browsers other than Chrome.
The Google engineering team from Aarhus, Denmark built V8 from scratch to respond to the dynamic and interactive sites.
Google Chrome was released as an open source project which intents to help make future browsers better while continuing to develop additional features and technology.
