Google Chrome is a warning shot over the bows of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

The open-source software project, to be detailed later Tuesday at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., should dispel any lingering thoughts that the browser wars are over. To be sure, it’s less cutthroat now than in the 1990s, but one of technology’s most powerful companies is now on the battlefield.

So how does Chrome change the competitive landscape?

Google Chrome has many competitors to contend with, according to these August stats.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Initially at least, it’s not likely to change the market share rankings. According to Net Applications’ browser market share statistics for August, IE has 72 percent share, Firefox 20 percent, Safari 6 percent, and Opera 1 percent.

But even before Google’s browser became available for download, its repercussions were traversing the industry. There are plenty of implications from a company as large as Google that builds a browser tuned to advance the company’s agenda of Web-based applications.

Here are some possible implications for the four major alternatives to Chrome.

Internet Explorer
IE still claims the dominant share of the browser market, and it still has the hard-to-beat distribution channel of being built into the most widely used operating system.

Firefox has been chipping away at IE’s share for years, but the dominance has remained fairly secure, and unless Chrome offers revolutionary new abilities, it’s not likely to do more than perhaps increase the chipping rate a bit.

Microsoft has lit a fire under its IE team, and given that Google is such a powerful Microsoft rival, that fire doubtless will burn all the hotter because of Chrome. The forthcoming IE 8, with beta 2 released last week and the final version officially due to ship by the end of January, is a sign of how serious Microsoft is.

Officially, Microsoft welcomes the competition. “The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online,” Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer general manager, said in a statement.

Vast numbers of people haven’t upgraded from IE 6, which is ancient in Internet years. That cuts both ways for Microsoft: it’s hard to get people to upgrade to IE 7 much less to IE 8, but those folks aren’t moving to the competition either.

Of course, with Google’s Web application agenda, the bigger long-term threat is to Microsoft’s Office team, not to its IE team.

Firefox
Firefox potentially stands to lose the most from Chrome.

It’s the leading alternative to IE and the standard bearer for those who love open-source software and revile Microsoft’s technology, its business practices, and its philosophy. If you’re hell-bent on taking down Microsoft, you could pick worse allies than Google.

Mozilla has something for the philosophical purists that Google lacks, though: a measure of independence. “Uniquely in this market, we’re a public-benefit, nonprofit group, with no other agenda or profit motive at all,” Mozilla Corp. Chief Executive John Lilly said in a blog posting Monday.

Survival is a powerful motive even if profit isn’t, though, and the Mozilla Foundation, the parent of the Mozilla Corp., relies on Google for tens of millions of dollars each year in exchange for prominent placement of Google in the browser’s search. Happily for Mozilla, Google just signed up for three more years of subsidizing Mozilla, so Firefox and other foundation activities should be financially sound at least for the time being.

Firefox has built a massive grassroots fan base, though. And even Google, for all its charisma, money, and power, will have a hard time replicating that.

Finally, though Chrome at first blush is bad news for Firefox, there’s a subtler reality at play: IE is the dominant browser, and the greater the number of credible underdogs that exist, the more that dominance can’t be taken for granted. Don’t be surprised to hear Mozilla and Google present themselves more as allies than foes.

Safari
Apple has expanded its Safari ambitions from Mac OS X to Windows, most notably by letting the browser hitch a ride along with the iTunes update software. However, Safari has yet to become a force to be reckoned with.

But Safari could benefit indirectly from Chrome: both browsers are based on the open-source WebKit rendering engine.

If Google sponsors aggressive Webkit development–and doesn’t end up wrestling with Apple for power over the project–both browsers stand to gain. Google’s Android browser for mobile phones, it should be noted, also is based on WebKit.

Opera
Opera has a small share of the browser market, so it’s the most likely to drop in position if Google Chrome catches on. It already fights for relevance against the bigger players.

But Opera is a scrappy company. Not surprisingly, it prefers to look at its own growth rather than its sliver of share, and CEO Jon Tetzchner points out that its share has grown each time a new browser has emerged as a viable competitor to Internet Explorer.

“Last year, we had more than 50 percent growth in our user base,” Tetzchner said. “I think we’ll do quite well this year as well. It seems every time there’s talk of new browsers, that’s been a positive thing for us. It has been good there is focus on browser alternatives.”

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

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Placefav is a social-bookmarking service for places. It was pitched to me as a cross between the currently defunctMuxtape and Delicious. A better thing to compare it to is the list-making feature on reviews service Yelp.

The ultimate aim is to pass your list along to someone else as a self-contained city guide. Things like this are useful when somebody asks you for a list of places or things to do if they’re visiting your hometown, or a vacation spot you might have a little extra local knowledge of. The site also offers the option to favorite other users and explore the lists of people nearby.

Like Muxtape, Placefav limits you to just a dozen spots for your favorite places. You can customize the colors, and if you’ve put in the addresses there are quick links for pop-out Google Maps. If you don’t know the address it will do its best to guess the address of a place based on the name and city it’s in. The entire list is self contained with its own vanity URL and can be accessed fairly quickly on mobile phones. Creator Kyle Bragger tells me he’s hoping to build an iPhone application that makes use of the device’s GPS to make entry and browsing a little faster.

Coming in later versions will be the option to make even larger lists and simply e-mail your places and have the service add it to a new or existing list. Bragger also hopes to include SMS support once he’s got the e-mail squared away. You can check out the list I made by clicking the screenshot below.

Compiled here is a list of food joints I put together in a few minutes. Each one has a map and any related photos pulled from the Web. Like Muxtape you can only put together a dozen places and each list you make has its own vanity URL.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Google has released the beta version of a new browser, Chrome. In its comic-book pre-announcement, Google stated correctly that watching videos, chatting, and even playing Web-based games didn’t exist when browsers were first invented. For the user, Google wants the browser to disappear and to focus on the applications and pages users are viewing, rather than on the border with its tools, and such. Google has rethought the Internet browser–some of its basic underpinnings are quite novel–but users will recognize some features as they exist in other, open-source browsers on the market today.

At the moment, only the Windows version of Chrome is available for download. Plans call for Mac OS X and Linux versions in the near future. That said, Google has released Chrome in 43 languages and in 122 countries.

Chrome is based on the open-source project Webkit, the same rendering engine used by Apple Safari. If a page renders in Safari, it will render in Chrome. Webkit is also the basis for Android, Google’s mobile platform, so it seems that Google is planning to use Chrome in mobile environments.

For more details, see the Chrome First Take on CNET.

The interface in Chrome is very different from other browsers and takes a little getting used to. Instead of the traditional Netscape/IE-style toolbar across the top, Chrome uses tabs. Moreover, the tabs are detachable, so the terms "tabs" and "windows" become interchangeable within Chrome. Detached tabs can be dragged and dropped into the browser, and tabs can be rearranged at any time.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi / CNET)

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Google introduced Chrome in part because it wants faster browsing and the richer Web applications that speed will unlock. So how does Chrome actually stack up?

Google's Chrome overpowers the other browsers on the five subtests by which Google measures its browser's JavaScript performance.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Lars Bak, the Google engineer who was the technical leader for Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, said at the launch event Tuesday he’s confident Chrome is “many times faster” than the rivals at running JavaScript, the programming language that powers Google Docs, Gmail, and many other Web applications.

But when pressed for specifics, he told me to try them out. So I did.

Google offers a site with five JavaScript benchmarks. On each one of these tests, Chrome clearly trounced the competition. I hope benchmarking experts and developers will weigh in with comments about how well these tests represent true JavaScript performance on the Web–either for ordinary sites or for rich Web apps.

Here’s the site description of the speed tests:

• Richards: OS kernel simulation benchmark, originally written in BCPL by Martin Richards (539 lines).

• DeltaBlue: One-way constraint solver, originally written in Smalltalk by John Maloney and Mario Wolczko (880 lines).

• Crypto: Encryption and decryption benchmark based on code by Tom Wu (1,689 lines).

• RayTrace: Ray tracer benchmark based on code by Adam Burmister (3,418 lines).

• EarleyBoyer: Classic Scheme benchmarks, translated to JavaScript by Florian Loitsch’s Scheme2Js compiler (4,682 lines).

Google's overall score is head and shoulders above the competition for executing JavaScript.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

A few notes: First, your mileage may vary; I ran these tests on my dual-core Windows XP machine.

Second, my apologies here to Opera, whose browser I don’t have installed.

Third, I tried to run the SunSpider benchmark tests as well, but perhaps because a lot of other curious people had the same idea on the day Chrome launched, I couldn’t get to the site.

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Andy Warhol’s prophecy was fulfilled with the advent of MTV’s programming and widespread reality television. We’re now seeing a new kind of micro-fame which lasts well beyond 15 minutes. You don’t have to have thousands of friends on My Space, Facebook or Twitter to feel like a “Weblebrity” — you can be the celebrity of your own social system regardless of size.

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Carter Murdoch, Senior Vice-President for Bank of America, tells InmanTV what he’s seeing in the US housing market right now.  more…

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At Hummer Winblad we often joke that we focus on the “boring side of software.” By this we mean that many of our companies tend to be described with words like core, infrastructure, B2B, backend, etc. We believe that these companies provide the infrastructure under which the next generations of software are built. They will be interesting and successful companies but it is unlikely your mom will ever know their names.

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