• Reuters, Wednesday, September 3, 2008 10:30 AM

Just in case it wasn't abundantly clear before, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in an interview with reporters, flatly stated that the idea behind Chrome is to displace operating systems like Microsoft's Windows. "I think operating systems are kind of an old way to think of the world," he said. "They have become kind of bulky, they have to do lots and lots of different (legacy) things."

Instead, Google thinks that any task done in a standalone desktop computer app can be delivered via the Web through a browser like Google's new Chrome. "We (Web users) want a very lightweight, fast engine for running applications," Brin said. "The kind of things you want to have running standalone (on a computer) are shrinking."

According to Reuters, Chrome "borrows liberally" from other open source browsers, including Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox. "We have borrowed good ideas from others," Google Vice President of Product Management Sindar Pichai said. "If you are a webmaster, and your site works in Apple Safari then it will work very well in Google Chrome," he said.

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