Google's browser Chrome arrives on tuesday

Google has revealed plans today to release an innovative new open source web browser called Chrome that includes some extraordinary and unprecedented features. Google says that its new browser will move the web forward and provide a stronger platform for emerging web standards.

"We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser," said Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai in a blog entry. "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."

The browser is built on top of Apple's WebKit HTML rendering engine, a lightweight renderer that is known for its clean code base, good performance, and excellent standards-compliance. WebKit's versatility and the ease with which it can be embedded in applications has led to its adoption in numerous contexts, including Google's Android web browser. Alongside WebKit, Google will be using its own JavaScript virtual machine called V8, which was designed for high performance and has some compelling features [...]