Google Strikes Again !

-contributed by Ankit

Google is best known for two reasons. Firstly because they have an uncanny ability to come up with totally new and innovative products such as Google Earth which none of its competitors would have even contemplated about.
Secondly because they are motivated enough to come up with much more efficient replacements of existing successful products and solutions of their competitors. Before the Google Search Engine became the world's most popularly used search engine, MSN and Yahoo were the leading players. Due to much improved search algorithms and faster search results, Google left them way behind. Google captures more than 65% of the search engine market whereas Yahoo has a market share of 20% and Microsoft has a meagre 7%.

Chrome, the latest offering from the R&D labs of Google is a web browser giving direct competition to Microsoft's Internet Explorer and the very successful Mozilla Firefox. Currently Internet Explorer is used by 70 % of the Internet users and Mozilla has a market share of 20%. Mozilla has been growing at a steady rate in last few years, mainly at the cost of Microsoft IE. The major reason for the huge market share of Microsoft Internet Explorer is the fact that it comes bundled with the Microsoft Windows. Google clearly saw an opportunity here as there would be millions of people who would easily change over to another browser, provided it is easily available. Google on the day of launch of Chrome, displayed the download link on the main page of Google search, giving it a huge publicity infront of millions of Google users.

Using Chrome is a refreshing experience purely because of a new look and feel which it provides. Performance wise too, it is doing pretty well. It works much faster than the IE and Firefox and takes lesser memory compared to them. Chrome seems to work fine with over 25 tabs open too. The homepage with thumbnail images of frequently visited sites makes your work faster and the history search is as efficient and comprehensive as the Google search itself.
Its not possible that there will only be the positive side of the Chrome. There have been a few of instances in last 2-3 days when I had to "kill" a webpage because it wasn't responding, but the good thing is that, a crash in one tab does not crash the whole browser.

Google Chrome will definitely eat up a huge chunk of Microsoft IE users in near future. With Google going aggressive with Android, the mobile phone OS, the launch of Google OS for computers seems to be pretty close. And that definitely would be some competition for Microsoft!!