PUNE: It's out from the mines. Google Inc has, after much anticipation, launched the new Web browser 'Google Chrome', designed to more quickly handle video-rich applications.

Confident of posing a challenge to browsers designed originally to handle text and graphics, this new browser, available in beta version in 122 countries and 42 languages including Hindi, may add a new dimension to the Web browser war.

But how easy would it be challenging the dominance of Microsoft Internet Explorer or its open source rival Mozilla Firefox?

Its makers claim that Chrome has been developed taking into account "the Web of today and also the applications of tomorrow", so that the new platform is a faster, safer and stable way to surf the Net. The developers cite many highlights of this new and cool browser.

The list from Google, includes combined search and address bar that quickly takes users where they want to go, a seamless web experience for users, a multi-process platform at the core for enhanced stability and security, separate browser tabs for better stability and responsiveness, and a new JavaScript engine, V8, which not only speeds up today's web applications, but enables a whole new class of web applications that couldn't exist on today's browsers.

So how much of these features have found favor from the users?

While its developers claimed Chrome to be so light that it can be easily downloaded from the Google homepage, Pallavi Sharma, a testing professional has been trying to install the Chrome, without any luck.

Another Pune-based geek, too points out download as the singular negative bit of 'Chrome'. “You can't download the whole thing. it has to be done on a patch basis,” shares Computer Science student and avid techie Srinivasan Viswanathan.

While some are still finding it a task to download and experience 'Chrome' with set-up and installation snags for now, others who have managed to have the feel of it have a mixed set of opinions.

Tech enthusiast Varun Arora dismisses Chrome's attractiveness and 'uber-cool' possibilities on account of problems he feels on session management, JavaScript etc. "There are two versions. The normal browser looks a little good but it has no add-ons and crashes quite often." he says.

From a technical standpoint, Saifi Khan, an open source expert from TWINCLING Society Hyderabad  finds Chrome a smart and high performance web client runtime given its separate JavaScript runtime environment, called V8 and with excellent support for AJAX components.

"This way, all Google client side implementations based on JavaScript, XML, Google Gears and other components (maybe parts of Android), etc. can work well together, yet not be affected by Operating System variations. Variations of Chrome can potentially be ported to Handheld M.I.D (Mobile Internet Devices). Chrome currently uses WebKit which is Open Source and is already used in Symbian based phones." Khan points out.

Avid techie Srinivasan Viswanathan rates Chrome on the positive, though not finding it much different than Mozilla. "It's not much dissimilar. The browser window is larger and the experience is almost same as Mozilla."

Chrome has its share of unique claims, a feature where 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, as its makers explained at the launch adding that Chrome organizes information into tabbed pages. Web programs can be launched in their own dedicated windows.

This feature is one that Srinivasan picks as a new and welcome concept. "The tabbing is surely much better. The concept of 'incognito' windows with no cookies or history is good."

Among Chrome's features is a special privacy mode that lets users create an "incognito" window where "nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged on your computer". This is a read-only feature with access to one's bookmarks of favorite sites.

He feels that in contrast to the dominant and proprietary biggies IE, Chrome would fall in the same bracket of open source based products as Mozilla.

As per Arora, Mozilla 3.0 with so many extensions is any day better than IE, which of late supports flash extensions or the new Chrome.

In fact, Google has said its engineers had borrowed from a variety of other open-source projects, including Apple Inc's WebKit and the Mozilla Firefox open-source browser. As a result, Google planned to make all of Chrome software code open to other developers to enhance and expand, the company said.

Khan has another comparison matrix where IE falls in proprietary license. Firefox in Mozilla license and Chrome in BSD license. "The choice of BSD license, clearly points to a model where both proprietary and Open Source contributions can be accepted with ease. BSD is the truly liberal license. Note, Android platform was also released under a similar license, Apache Software License." Khan argues.

There's a still quite some user-demands that this beta browser can add. Arora wishes Google to integrate friend-feed type features while Srinivasan agrees that add-ons are a missing piece in Chrome, unlike Mozilla.

As to the improvement areas in Khan's opinion, at this point in time, Chrome does not have Plugin support. "This will be "the" area to watch in terms what innovation is delivered to support technologies like Flex, Flash etc. On other aspects, the Jury is still out."
 
Chrome comes after the recent introduction by archrival Microsoft of its Internet Explorer 8. Internet Explorer has roughly three-quarters of the browser market, followed by Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari. There's no doubt a lot of metallurgy that the market and users portend if Chrome sets the composition right and at the right time.