On Monday Google announced that they are launching a new browser called Chrome.

The browser will be available in 100 countries from Tuesday and is billed by Google as being a competitor to both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox. The browser will be cross platform working with Windows, Mac and Linux and is the first software release for Linux that Google has released. The developers at Google who have been working on this new browser started with a blank page - looking at what the guys at Google would ideally like a browser to do, having spent so many hours on the internet.

The Chrome browser is aimed at both making the internet easier for user and also to drive innovation on the internet. Designed to be clean and easy to use it's focussed more on the experience of browsing the web. Their tabbed browsing will run each tab as an isolated instance meaning that if a website crashes the browser won't shut down as with IE and Firefox, just that one tab. As a result of their user focus Google are aiming to make their browsing experience much faster and user-friendly.

We've commented a lot on the good SEO plug-ins that are available for Firefox but we have yet to hear if any similar functionality will be available in Google Chrome.

Google Chrome is only being released as a beta version and will be constantly improving and building on the stability of the product.

We wait to see if the new Google Chrome browser lives up to the hype when it's released later today and once I've had a play I'll let you know what I think!