Search Engine giant Google has released an internet browser, called Chrome.

Initially its End User Licence specified that everything that one did with the browser belonged to Google. That meant that if you wrote a book online using it, they would own your book - and so on. It created such a furore in the online community that they had to remove the clause, saying that it was a 'cut and paste error'.

That little mistake has caused quite a few people not to want to use it - coupled with the 'who needs another browser' problem. Feeling is that with every different browser engine rendering web pages differently, the market is already overcrowded with web page authors having to cope with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera and their variants withut having to worry about another one. Additionally, the online community worries that Google is collecting too much information about its users via its increasing amount of available software - and what better application to do that with than a browser?

Google say that Chrome is less demanding on the memory and chips which run computers than current browsers, and it isolates each separate tab that is opened, making sure that it never crashes. It's also open source, which means other developers have access to its code.

It seems that the browser market isn't their only aim though - the idea is that many other applications will be browser based, meaning that people won't need to host big applications like Microsoft Office on their own pc, but will be able to access all those functions online via the browser. This means that it won't matter if you run Windows, Linux or a Mac - and that Microsoft shouldn't be resting on their laurels.

The beta version of Chrome was released in 100 countries just days after Microsoft's latest upgrade to Internet Explorer,and its introduction coincides with the appearance of the first mobile phones operating with Google's Android software. Internet surfing via mobiles is the industry's next big growth market with Apple also trying to capture the market with the Safari browser on its iPhones.

Read Google's own take on it here