Google Browser Chrome: Is Internet Explorer under Threat?

Google has launched its browser Chrome this week. Though it is a beta release and is released for windows platform only, it is an interesting development and the Google-Microsoft war is hotting up. Microsoft has been the dominant player in the market and controls more than 70% market share. In recent times, Mozilla has done well and now enjoys a market share of around 20+%. How will Chrome change the market scenario or will it be able to do so?

Whether Chrome will be able to spoil Microsoft's party or not, it will certainly force Microsoft to allocate more resources towards IE. It will not be easy for Microsoft to kill Chrome as it did in the case of Netscape with offering free browser. Google's offering is anyways free. There are couple of areas, where Chrome can certainly score over IE. If you use IE, you will notice that it is resource hungry and that's a big negative for me. On my laptop using Vista, IE 7 with 3 tabs open, consumes approx 140 MB of memory. Whereas Chrome with 3 tabs, consumes appox. 25 MB of memory, wow, that's pretty cool. Secondly, Google will definitely offer Chrome on all platforms like Mozilla and that is going to be a killer. Microsoft, it seems, will be watching Chrome's journey more closely than any one of us.

Very interesting space to watch for!!!!

Cheers

Abhishek