Wednesday, September 3, 2008

New kid in town

Chrome is a challenge to Microsoft's browser, used by about three-quarters of Web surfers. But it could equally be called a challenge to Microsoft's Office software suite, because what Google really wants to do is to make the browser a stable and flexible platform that can do practically everything we want to do with a computer, from word processing and e-mail to photo editing.

To strengthen that effort, Chrome was designed to improve on the way other browsers handle JavaScript, one of the technologies used to make Web pages more interactive and more like desktop software applications. Google's online word processing and spreadsheet programs use this technology, but it's also very widely deployed on Web pages to do less sophisticated things, like drop-down menus. More here