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Google is launching an open source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox. The browser is designed to be lightweight and fast, and to cope with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and multimedia.

Called Chrome, it will launch as a beta for Windows machines in 100 countries, with Mac and Linux versions to come. "We realised... we needed to completely rethink the browser," said Google's Sundar Pichai in a blog post. The new browser will help Google take advantage of developments it is pushing online in rich web applications that are challenging traditional desktop programs. Chrome will be an open-source product, meaning anyone can modify the software code and add features.

Google has a suite of web apps, such as Documents, Picasa and Maps which offer functionality that is beginning to replace offline software. "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," Mr Pichai, VP Product Management, wrote.

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They were going for the gold and they got it - Firefox has set a world download record with the release of Firefox 3 with 8.3 million downloads. beating its own goal by three million. Mozilla reported that there were around 8,000 downloads a minute, with a one-day estimate of between five and seven million downloads. Almost 2,7 million users have downloaded Firefox 3 only in the United States. Germany has ranked second in the Top 10 of Firefox fans with 700,000 downloads, while in Spain and France the browser has surpassed 300,000 downloads.

Mozilla Firefox, the little Web browser with the quirky name, has grown up fast. Four years ago, Firefox was an obscure project Microsoft felt free to ignore. Now it has grabbed about a fifth of the market worldwide. And while Microsoft has shipped only one upgrade to its Internet Explorer in that time, Firefox just hit its fourth major release. Like the earlier 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 versions, Firefox 3 -- a free download for Windows 2000, XP and Vista; Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5; and recent Linux releases at http://mozilla.com - makes the Web easier and safer to use in a few distinct ways.

Its tabbed browsing lets you switch among multiple sites in one window, and a small box at the top right of every window lets you direct a query to your choice of Web search engines. "Find as you type" text searching jumps to a given word on a page in moments. Its separation from the guts of Windows makes it safer and more reliable than Internet Explorer. And Firefox's open-source code allows inspection by anybody, making for fast bug fixes.

Firefox 3 offers malware protection, web forgery protection page, anti-virus integration, Vista parental controls, better protection against cross-site JSON data leaks and much more. In terms of performance, Firefox 3.0 promises better speed, by bringing improvements to the JavaScript engine, a reduced amount of memory used (after hundreds of leaks have been fixed), and better reliability (with user bookmarks, cookies and preferences stored in a secure database format) preventing data loss and system crashes.

The new Smart Bookmarks will enable the categorization of user’s folders by several criteria, such as the most frequently visited, recently bookmarked and recently tagged websites. This time, Firefox developers -- employees of the Mountain View, Calif., nonprofit Mozilla, plus outside volunteers -- stopped pretending that we all bookmark our favorite pages with the care of reference librarians. Instead, they built a better history function: as you start typing, Firefox will present a list of all the sites that match, then narrow that list as you continue.

Firefox 3 integrates a revised download manager which makes it much easier to locate downloaded files. Now the users can see and search on the name of the website where a file came from. Also, active downloads and time remaining are always shown in the status bar as the files are download. Resumable downloading means the users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting the network connection.

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Images courtesy of eFluxMedia and inquisitr.com

Original Source: Washington Post, eFluxMedia and Digital Trends