Google’s Chrome web browser is aimed more towards web engineers than web surfers, who will have to wait to until future versions and for new add-ons to arrive in order to experience features that will impress. It does offer an innovative take on tabbed browsing, allowing you to detach and move tabs, shortcuts to access past searches and page visits, and a default page menu that lists your most-visited sites, but beyond those tweaks Google is offering the same promise for consumers that others web browsers are chasing; to experience the internet faster, safer, easier, and with more stability.

How well Chrome will reach those goals is still to be seen. The web browser is currently only offered as a beta product, a work-in-progress, and only for Windows Vista and XP users. Google will offer a version for both Mac and Linux users, but at a later date.

It’s not so much a product designed to compete against Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, and other web browser creators as it is a call for all companies to create better web browsers period. Chrome’s main innovations take place “under the hood” and are offered as Open Source innovations, meaning they are free for anyone to adopt and use in their own products. Google’s entire business takes place throughout the internet itself and so they see their interests served regardless of which company takes web browsing to the next level, in fact they see their interests served if all companies do exactly that.

“If the web gets better” explains Sundar Pichai, VP Product Manager for Chrome, “more people use the web and Google benefits.”

According to Google, the problem with today’s web browsers are that they are all still based on a design that was first created to display web pages. Just that simple little task. Over the years many companies have found ingenious ways to squeeze more use out of web browsers, allowing us to use them to handle e-mail, edit photos, watch videos, even edit spreadsheets. The web browser has become a tool of many uses, but its design, despite the changes over the years, is still geared towards just one.

Google feels it is time to make the web browser work more like a computer or an operating system. It’s time to design web browsers specifically for the task of running software. Chrome is designed so that each web page, each tab that appears, is allocated its own set of computer resources, its own allotment of processes and memory, so that memory is more efficiently handled, and web surfing as an experience doesn’t slow down as you open more and more web pages. It also allows them to isolate the actions of each page, so if one page should open with a piece of malware or spyware on it, it can’t access the others and will disappear when you close its specific window.

They have streamlined the way software can run within a browser and have isolated the way crashes occur so that when a web page of plug-in crashes, it will allow the rest of the browser to continue to operate. They hope the new technologies inside will spur software designers to add more complex uses for the web browser in the future. In building their new browser, they have borrowed components from other companies, using Apple WebKit and sections from Mozilla’s Firefox, both actions intended to set an example for other companies to do the same with their own browser code.

With Internet Explorer, Microsoft is estimated as having a 72% market share on the web browser industry today and with the popularity of Google’s brand amongst computer users of all walks of life, it’s not unfair to think that any web browser made by Google, regardless of features, could take away some of Microsoft’s dominance. Perhaps that’s something Google is secretly hoping for, because on the surface Chrome isn’t designed as a competitive product at all, but more of a set of blueprints, a proposal for web designers to adopt and use in their own work. Google’s interests are served regardless of how you access the internet, in fact it’s not in their best interest to inspires users to use one browser over another, but rather to have all browsers capable of running more advanced software, which I’m guessing they need in order to introduce the next line of Google web services and Gproducts, the space where their real sense of competition exists.

The name Chrome isn’t in reference to a shiny polish or appearance, but instead to the term web browser creators give to the frame surrounding a browser. Chrome doesn’t communicate a new experience to Google’s users as much as it does to their competitors and partners. The results may benefit consumers in the end, but for now it’s a case of wait and see.