Competition drives things forward. Even though IE still commands a large share of the market, it’s glacial slow-progression forwards means that even non-techy users are looking for something else to surf the web with. Until now, people have had the choice between Firefox, Safari or Opera.. (stats).

Now they have another choice – Google Chrome.

I’m not sure on the name, or if we’re looking at the next Google Adsense (game changing), or the next Google talk (nice, but has yet to really take off), but it’s certainly a good development. It will be interesting to see if this starts to eat into the Firefox share of the market, especially considering that the ink must be barely dry on the Firefox / Google revenue sharing deal, recently extended until 2011.. perhaps it’s cheaper to develop your own web browser than continue to shell out the money in the long term..

This is a browser built on top of WebKit – the underlying technology in Safari (although originally developed for Konqueror – the web browser in KDE), this is not the same as Firefox, which uses Gecko.

Initial impressions are pretty good, it has some of the same CSS rendering quirks as Safari has (some strangeness on the Jumpgate Evolution site, but nothing serious – and hopefully something which will be fixed in later versions of the browser.

Props to Google though, for trying to explain the difference in memory allocation between the two approaches on their comic book. Nice!