That can be the only explanation for the events of the past couple of days. First the company announced one of the most audacious moves I’ve ever seen with the Google Chrome Frame.

Not content with having its own browser, Google now wants to hijack Microsoft’s as well. Google Chrome Frame is an IE plug-in that replaces the IE rendering engine with the WebKit engine that underpins Chrome. Why? Because like the boy racers that hang around the McDonalds car park in my local town centre, Google wants to show off that it has the fastest engine.

Is this, as Google claims, an altruistic attempt to allow IE users “to seamlessly enjoy modern web apps at blazing speeds, through the familiar interface of the version of IE that they are currently using”? Pull the other one. The type of person who installs a new rendering engine in their web browser is the type of person who’s more than capable of downloading and installing Google Chrome for themselves.

Coupled with the fact that web developers need to add a line of code to their sites to make IE run the Chrome engine, and you can pretty much guarantee that this is going to be the nichest of niche features. Google Chrome Frame is nothing more than a cheap publicity stunt, designed to make Internet Explorer look bad and drive uptake of Chrome.

Another sign of Google’s anti-Microsoft agenda arrived with the launch of Picasa 3 yesterday (the most minor of updates, conveniently timed to coincide with the launch of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 – remember kids, do no evil). I installed Picasa 3 to take a poke around the new features yesterday, and then got a bit of a shock when I fired up Internet Explorer 8 later that evening.

A pop-up box appeared the moment I fired up the browser, telling me that “an [unnamed] application you installed wants to change your default search engine”.  I’ll leave you to figure out what search engine it wanted to change it to.

Google already has a monopoly-sized share of the search market – does it really need to sully the otherwise excellent Picasa with such dirty tricks? Or is it really just trying to pi** Microsoft off, after all?