To help everyone understand the features and benefits, Google created a technical "comic book" as well as gave a live demonstration during their press conference announcing the product.



The central idea of Google's Chrome browser was to build a browser that runs today's and tomorrow's web applications faster, with fewer crashes, than either Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Mozilla's Firefox browsers. Given that Google employees spend most of their work day doing work in a browser; it makes sense that they were motivated to create a browser that runs web applications quickly without crashing. No doubt, today's slower and less stable browsers must have been a problem for their productivity.

Google built Chrome from the ground up so that it would be fast and stable. The stability in Chrome comes from the fact that each tab in the browser runs as a separate process within the operating system. Traditional desktop applications have been working this way for years and now Google's Chrome copies this feature. The benefit of having the website or web app in each tab run as a separate process is that when the site or application running in one tab has a problem or crashes, the rest of the tabs will continue to run unaffected. From a user's point of view, this feature in Chrome means more confidence that they won't lose their work in progress while working in a web application.

The new tab system in the Google Chrome browser has allowed Google to easily implement new features. One of the more cool features is the option to separate an existing tab into a new window, simply by grabbing and dragging that tab out of the current browser window.

In another move that surprised some, Google decided to release Chrome to the world as "open source" software, thus allowing developers worldwide to make changes, modifications and custom additions to Chrome according to their own needs and desires. The simple step of releasing Chrome as open source has set the stage for faster and more varied innovation that Google could have managed itself.

The initial release of Chrome was dubbed a "beta" and indeed the version number displayed in the "about box" shows version 0.2. Some downloaders and early users were expecting a more finished product and questioned Google's choice on releasing Chrome so early.

When asked to describe how Google's Chrome is different from Internet Explorer or Firefox, an easy way to think of it is to say that "Google built Chrome from scratch to run today's and tomorrow's web applications quickly" and that "Internet Explorer and Firefox are based on older technology created to display web pages, not run web applications".

As more and more people move to do more and more of their work inside of web applications instead of desktop applications, the need for a fast stable environment to run web apps is obvious. Clearly Google saw this and created the Chrome browser just for that purpose.