Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the Web faster, safer, and easier. Use one box for everything--type in the address bar and get suggestions for both search and Web pages. Thumbnails of your top sites let you access your favorite pages instantly with lightning speed from any new tab. Desktop shortcuts allow you to launch your favorite Web apps straight from your desktop
Note: The Download Now link will take you to the Google Chrome Web site, where you must accept the end-user license agreement before downloading. Also, the 474K downloadable file is only a stub installer. You must remain connected to the Internet during installation to complete the full download of Google Chrome.
Google's Chrome web browser was released partly as a defensive move to stop Microsoft using its market dominance to squeeze out other Google products, the firm has conceded.
Chrome was made available for free download on Tuesday, and was trumpeted as a faster, more stable alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which is used by around three-quarters of surfers.
Google Chrome is available for free download in 100 countries
But Google's chief executive has now admitted that their was a "defensive component" to the hurried release, as the firm seeks to prevent its other services – which include search, email, mapping and desktop publishing – from being outflanked.
"Microsoft has a history of favouring its own applications and I can give you 500,000 pages of court testimony, document web blogs and so forth and so on about that," Eric Schmidt told the Financial Times.
Many developers are now designing software to work on particular browsers, and Google, which had previously been reluctant to enter the browser market, believes it can offer a better platform to these new applications, he said.
"The thing that changed in the past couple of years… is that people started building powerful applications on top of browsers and that browsers that were out there, particularly Explorer, were not up to the task of running complex application."
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He added: "There is an opportunity for a platform and that platform for running these new applications is something that you can't really do on IE7, and that's the argument."
Microsoft's latest browser update, Internet Explorer 8, was released last week, offering many of the security and privacy features contained in Chrome. Google and Microsoft are now in direct competition across a number of fronts.
If Chrome comes to dominate the browser market, it would deliver users to other Google products including its search engine, Gmail email service and Google Docs, which offers online word processing and spreadsheet software.
There is also speculation that Chrome, which boasts features beyond those of a traditional browser, is Google's first step towards creating an operating system to rival Microsoft's Windows.
