Google's Chrome browser loads Web pages faster

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Nearly a year ago, Google introduced Chrome, an Internet browser that aims to take on Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla with a faster way to surf the Web.

Chrome sports a minimalist design, like the Google home page. The idea: Take away some of the fat and offer less clutter to make Web pages zip open. Since its debut, Chrome has evolved into a customizable entity, much like Google's Gmail. New "skins," for instance, let you personalize the look.

"We spend more time with our browsers than we do in our cars," says Brian Rakowski, a Google product manager. "It's nice to shine light on how important the browser choice is, and to offer new alternatives."

Google says Chrome has attracted more than 30 million users. That may sound large, but in the Internet world of more than 1 billion active users, it's actually quite meager, says David Yoffie, a Harvard University professor. "It's hard to get people to switch browsers."

Chrome has gained acclaim for speed but hasn't been able to dent Microsoft's hold on browser use. Microsoft's Internet Explorer has a 67% market share, compared with 22.4% for Mozilla's Firefox and just 2.5% for Chrome, according to measurement firm Net Applications.

To try to wean people from IE and Firefox, Google promotes Chrome on its sites and releases updates regularly. On Monday, Google began letting outside software developers experiment with a feature that syncs Web page bookmarks so they're accessible from any computer. It will show up in Chrome later this year.

This comes on top of an update earlier this month that ratcheted up the speed even more. Google says Chrome is now 35% faster than the previous version, which itself was 50% faster than the initial Chrome debut.

The new version is offered as a beta, or test. (Go to google.com/chrome and click on the link that points to the beta version.) Among the new features in the beta:

•Just type the name of a website into the address bar, and more times than not, Google figures out where you want to go and takes you right there. An "omnibox" adds a drop-down menu with suggestions for similar sites, searches and bookmarks.

•You can add style with the Themes gallery, which adds brown, green, black and other background colors to transform the look of your Chrome browser.

What's still not coming — yet — is a Mac version. Getting Chrome to work with Apple computers has taken longer than Google expected. "We're making steady progress," Rakowski says. "We will have a Mac version this year."

Google steps up its game

In the second half of 2010, Google intends to compete even more aggressively against Microsoft with the release of a new computer operating system, a Windows alternative aimed at ultra-portable netbook PCs.

The name of the new program, which will be given free to computer manufacturers: Chrome OS.

"When we built Google Chrome, we built it with speed, security and simplicity as the three benchmarks," Rakowski says. "Those same principles will be applied to the operating system."

Since Google announced the Chrome OS last month, the company has said very little about it publicly, and Rakowski declined to elaborate.

He preferred to talk about the swiftness of the Chrome browser. "We're obsessed with speed. It's one of those things everyone benefits from."

PC World tested the four main browsers in July and found Chrome with the fastest page load time, with an average loading time of 1.699 seconds, vs. 1.762 seconds for Firefox, followed by 1.833 for Internet Explorer and 1.964 for Safari.

But with Google's browser market share at just 2.5% after a year of trying to persuade consumers to try Chrome, Yoffie doesn't think the speed message is resonating with consumers.

"For most people, speed just isn't enough of a reason to switch," he says. "If Google expects to grow Chrome, it will need to market much more aggressively, and find a different value proposition than just speed."

The irony, says analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence, is that Google's position with Chrome is akin to where rival Microsoft is in search with its new Bing search engine.

Microsoft has been trying for years to be taken seriously in search. But with a lopsided market share — 65% for Google to less than 10% for Microsoft — it hasn't seen its share get out of the single digits for years.

Microsoft recently announced a partnership with Yahoo that will replace its search with Bing, allowing the firms to get a combined market share of about 25%.

"It's pretty hard to break ingrained behavior," Sterling says.