Google gets into the browser business

Last night on the Google Blog, a post introducing the about-to-be-released Chrome browser. The motivation and goals are described in this 40 page comic book. I’ve started to read through it. The technical goals seem reasonable enough, but Google shouldn’t be in the browser business. Why didn’t they work their ideas into Firefox? My prediction: this is going to be bad for users. Update: A more optimistic colleague sees Chrome being marketed as a reference implementation to inspire others’ work and improve the state of browsers globally. That could be a good thing.