Seeker Blog

This is a game-changer: here’s a brief from Matt Cutts:

Google just officially confirmed that it will release a new open-source web browser, called Google Chrome (that link should go live sometime tomorrow).

I can’t wait to talk more about Google Chrome, but I’ll hold off until it officially launches. Once people can download Google Chrome, I plan to talk about my experiences using Google Chrome, to lay some truth on you about questions you might ask about Google Chrome, and to give some tips for power browsers.

In the mean time, it looks like Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped got an early copy of a comic by Scott McCloud about Google Chrome. You might as well go ahead and read the comic book (or if the server is overloaded, I’m sure you can get a copy from Google in a few days). Update: here’s a link to the official Google Chrome comic book. It’s the best 40-page comic about web browsers that I’ve ever read!

Don’t laugh at the comic book - it is a superb little text on browser architecture. NOTE: Chrome uses my favorite rendering base WebKit — this is the guts of Apple’s Safari browser. Webit is of course an open source codebase.

And WebKit is also the rendering engine for Google’s new open source mobile OS: Android. Here’s a market share tidbit from the Webkit Surfin’ Safari blog: Safari Hits 6.25% Market Share

The latest browser market share data is in, and Safari has hit 6.25%, breaking 6% for the first time. Last month’s share was 5.81%, so this is a significant increase. It was only nine months ago that Safari broke 5%. Safari market share has now almost tripled from 2.14% in June 2005, when the WebKit Open Source project launched.

This growth, combined with recent WebKit adoption in projects such as the Iris Browser, Qt 4.4, Android, Adobe AIR, Epiphany, KDE Plasma, iCab and more, is breathtaking and shows huge positive momentum for the WebKit project. Thanks and congratulations to everyone who has contributed to the project.