BANGALORE, INDIA: Adding a new dimension to the Web browser war and offering a newer and simplified browsing experience, Google Inc. today launched its Web browser, ‘Google Chrome’, which may challenge the dominance of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The new browser, available in beta version in 122 countries and 42 languages including Hindi, has been developed taking into account “the Web of today and also the applications of tomorrow”, according to its makers.

While interacting with media via web cast from Mountain View, California, Chrome's developers said the new platform is a faster, safer and stable way to surf the Net.

“It took us nearly 18 months of hard work to develop Chrome,” said Sundar Pichai, vice president, product management, Google, Inc. “Our aim was to make the browsing experience as simple as possible and we wanted the browser to keep out of your way and never interrupt. We think of the browser as the window to the web.”

Whatever Google touches has kind of youthfulness to it – be the whacky names of the products or the user friendliness or even the Google logo that celebrates all the memorable occasions by taking new shape.

And Chrome too offers a lot of new experience which any web surfer would love to experiment and enjoy.

While demonstrating some key features of the new product, Rahul Roychaudhary, product development manager, Google, at Bangalore said tabs are quite easy to use in Chrome, which adds to its user-friendliness.

“While opening a new tab in Google Chrome, the user can see a page that includes thumbnails of nine most visited sites in that computer apart from recent searches and bookmarks,” he said.

Also the combined search and address bar takes users where they want to go with the click of a mouse.

Unlike the conventional browsers, each browser tab works as a separate process in Chrome. So, even if one tab crashes others remain stable and responsive, thus saving time and energy of restarting the browser, Rahul pointed out.

The developers said Google has built a new Javascript engine, V8, to speed up today’s web applications and also to enable a whole new class of web applications that couldn’t exist in today’s browsers.

In order to further expand its reach Mac and Linux versions of Chrome will also be launched soon, he said.

While announcing the launch of Chrome, Google made it clear that it would continue providing support to the Mozilla Foundation, the makers of FireFox, so far the only competitor to Internet Explorer.

Built upon other open source projects Google Chrome is being released as an open source project under the name Chromium (ww.chromium.org).

Google is not unaware of the market strength of Internet Explorer, with nearly three-fourth of the surfers worldwide using that platform. Moreover, Internet Explorer is preloaded in majority of the computers.

Admitting the fact that it is a great task to make Chrome reach the users, Sundar said Google would work out strategies to overcome that barrier by promoting the product through different means, including the homepages of Google.

Moreover, Chrome is so light that it can be easily downloaded from the Google homepage, the developers said.