Google released their own web browser today, Google Chrome. Right now it's only available for Windows XP and Vista but I'm sure it will be cross platform soon. It's based on WebKit which is the same rendering engine that Apple uses for Safari. This is a good things for web developers as we won't have to support another new rendering engine. WebKit is open source and very standards compliant.

One major difference is Google's focus on simplicity. Taking a page out of Apple's playbook they've decided to strip away everything that isn't needed and deliver a rocket fast simple browser. They wrote their own Javascript engine that is supposed to be significantly faster and I suspect they've learned a lot from Gmail and other Google apps.

The clear business strategy is to deliver an application platform for the web. If they have a web browser that compiles javascript to native code for execution they've basically created the .Google Framework for Windows. The Microsoft .Net Framework compiles C# to an intermediate language which is then compiled to native code. Now Google can use their toolsets like GWT to compile dynamically to native code on a windows host. Imagine GMail running as fast as your native mail client. The last part that's needed is offline access. Google Gears provides that feature already.

 So, Google just delivered the tools to send a web application directly to your desktop running at near native speed. You don't need to learn Silverlight, Flash or Adobe Air. Just HTML and javascript.

The platform wars are moving beyond Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux to Silverlight Runtime vs. Adobe Air vs. Google Chrome