Google has surprised the world with its new browser. The product introduction through a comic was a brilliant exercise of showing the superior features of their browser, most of them quite technical, in an simple, plain, easy to understand manner.

Google wants the browser to make the OS irrelevant. The intent was already clear when they launched Gears to power up Google Docs and Google Readers by giving them access to local storage so that applications could run on the browser even when offline.  Chrome is the next step to make sure that the browser is able to run complex and rich applications, as fast as they would run on the OS. 

That is why Chrome includes a fast Javascript Virtual Machine, called V8, designed to run complex Javascript code at the speed of native OS applications. It uses WebKit for rendering, the same engine as Apple’s Safari, and it has been heavily tested with millions of web pages cached in Google’s search platform, to make sure that developers will not need to adapt web applications to yet another browser. As Google will use its browser to drive web innovations, it is open source so that new inventions will be easily available to other browsers.

Quick to render pages and run Javascript, simple clean user interface, more secure against crashes (than IE7, which is easy), includes anti malware and anti-phishing protection, and new nice features, as the Incognito navigation. If you thought that browsers was just a commodity with few room for differentiation, meet Chrome. The perfect fit to run applications on the Cloud safely and fast.

See clip above on Google presentation of Chrome yesterday.