Tuesday is the big day for Google as it releases it’s recently announced open source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox. Chrome is designed to be lightweight and fast, and to cope with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and multimedia. Sounds a bit like Firefox to me.. The timing of the Chrome release co-incides with the Beta of IE 8.0 recently, methinks the boys up in Redmond will be pretty pissed.

“We realised… we needed to completely rethink the browser,” said Google’s Sundar Pichai in a blog post.

“What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build,” Mr Pichai, VP Product Management, wrote.

The launch of a beta version of Chrome on Tuesday will be Google’s latest assault on Microsoft’s dominance of the PC business. The firm’s Internet Explorer program dominates the browser landscape, with 80% of the market.
New features will included “isolated” tabs designed to prevent browser crashes and a more powerful JavaScript engine.

Having a number of tabs open in a single browser eats up memory. If a browser is running slow, a user’s natural inclination is to close a few tabs? In some cases, however, little bits of the closed tabs remain, which eats up space and requires the operating system to grow the browser’s address space, according to Google. With Chrome, there will be a different tab for each process, including plug-ins.

“When a tab is closed in Google Chrome, you’re ending the whole process,” according to the comic. “You can look under the hood with Google Chrome’s task mananger to see what sites are using the most memory, downloading the most bytes and abusing your CPU” so you can place “blame where blame belongs.”

Google also promised “improved speed and responsiveness across the board.” “We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers,” Pichai and Upson wrote. Like OpenSocial and Android, Chrome will be an open source initiative.

Tuesday’s beta release will be available for Windows users. “We’re hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust,” Pichai and Upson wrote. “This is just the beginning — Google Chrome is far from done,” they wrote. “Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.”