Google goes Chrome

There's been a lot of discussion in the last week over Google's entry into the browser wars. The real impact of Chrome is that Google rather than trying to simply displace IE, Firefox and Safari, Google wants to own the interface for Web 2.0.

Google's vision is based on the browser as the operating system, with Web 2.0 enabling most users to spend all their time inside their browser. As a result, Google has designed Chrome from the ground-up as a multi-threaded browser capable of running multiple applications simultaneously with each window or tab in its own protected memory space. What underlies Chrome won't matter - Mac, Windows, Linux, etc., rather Google hopes that delivering a superior browser will enable it to own the user interface for Web 2.0 based applications.

I believe it's too early to tell whether or not Chrome will succeed, especially until plug-ins become as widely available as they are now for FireFox, but it wouldn't surprise me to see major software and SaaS vendors begin to release versions of their applications or services optimized for Chrome.