Why launch Chrome (Google’s new “browser”) when Firefox, Google’s favored son, is doing so well? Because Google needs its own. Using a comic book to introduce it is fun, and certainly, there’s always room for new approaches to platform and interface, and Chrome looks to have a lot of neat new features and a fresh approach. But what this really tells us is that Google is dead serious about the distribution business, for one, and dead serious about the operating system business, for another. Reading through the book, I am struck by how similar the language is to traditional operating system overviews. Multithreading, stable development platforms, etc. etc.
With the IE 8 in beta, and Firefox going strong, it looks to be a good season for innovation on the Web.