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I thought maybe I was imagining the massive bottleneck with web applications. I thought it was just me who thought it was mad to force a browser into one monolithic thread, every tab fighting for a share of a single CPU core, while the gigaflops of power available from the rest of the system sat unused. I'd ask Intel what it was doing about the inability to thread web applications and it would say, "Oh, the browser developers are handling that." So I'd ask Mozilla the same question and it would say something like, "Well, we can't do much really. JavaScript doesn't support threads."

But now you can ask Google and it'll say, "Yes, we've solved that one. It's called Chrome."

Chrome is a landmark. It's the point at which Google stops playing around the edges looking coy. Chrome is not harsh words. It's not even a bully in the playground giving Microsoft a wedgie (to use Tim Danton's analogy from the Prolog column). It's serious. There will be casualties.

Imagine, if you will, a bad-ass Google. A Google as cast by John Woo in a modish gangster flick. Bad-ass Google is wearing a Yakuza-style suit, with black tie and wraparound shades. There's stylish rain and shadows. Bad-ass Google is muscular, but lean and alert. And he has guns in both hands. But heck, bad-ass Google isn't evil. He's cool as hell, an avenging angel. And he exposes the Mac in those adverts for the nerd wearing Gap khakis that he really is.

If you'd been watching earlier you'd have seen bad-ass Google carve names into two bullets, one for each gun. The first is marked 'Internet Explorer'. The second, Teflon-coated,

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heavy-calibre and possibly hollow-tipped, is scratched with the word 'Windows'.

For Chrome is not another web browser, not another bit player in the ranks of Sea Monkeys, Safaris, Geckos and Operas. You could call it a browser if you wanted, or a web application platform. But you could also call it an operating system.

With Chrome, each website tab will run in a separate process. It'll have its own memory resources and you'll be able to open up the Task Manager and see each one, just like a normal application. And that's the key to the massive shift that Chrome represents.

For sure, it needs an underlying host OS as a platform to take care of boring things such as access to the hardware. But then, Windows also needs another OS - usually called the BIOS - for similar reasons. There's little fundamental difference. Just as you can't see the BIOS when you're running Windows, the time may well be approaching when you won't be able to see Windows when you're running Chrome. Or Windows might not be there at all. It might be lying in the morgue with a tag on its toe, an alternative lightweight OS kernel and windowing system ushered in to take its place.

As the comic book says - yes, there's a stylish comic book to go with the John Woo film, which you'll find at www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome - Chrome will let you place the blame where blame belongs. With each tab running as a process - essentially a separate application - you'll be able to see which are hogging resources, chewing up your RAM and slugging your CPU. And, if one of them is trying to grab a whole CPU core, you'll likely have another one - or three, or even seven if you're tooled up in the hardware department - to run the others. The rest of your web applications won't be straitjacketed into submission and those Flash applications will get the resources they want. The browser has just become a multitasking operating system, unshackled from a single process and able to control and corral all of the system's hardware resources toward what most of us actually do, most of the time: run web applications.