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Click here to read our first impressions of Chrome

The search giant claimed it was forced to develop its own browser because the likes of Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera were simply not fast enough to cope with the demands of its web apps.

"The pace of development of apps on the internet has outpaced browser development," claimed Eric Tholome, product managing director of applications at Google, speaking in London this evening.

"There's a lot of frustration out there that we could solve. The only way we could do that is from a fresh start," he said.

Tholome claimed Google's application developers are constantly held back by the likes of Firefox and IE. "Innovation on today's websites is limited by today's browsers," he added. "Gmail today launches hundreds of kilobytes of

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JavaScript. We're at the very limits of what you can do without crashing the browser."

Google has developed its own JavaScript engine (V8) for Chrome, and hopes that other browsers will adopt the open-source code. "If the browsing eco-system becomes more sophisticated as this [technology] spreads through Chrome and other browsers... the web community will do things we haven't even seen yet," Tholome added.

Google claims Chrome has been two years in development. Given the long development time and huge resources needed to create and maintain a browser, we asked if Google was tempted to simply buy Mozilla? Tholome smiled and said "we wouldn't normally answer questions like that", before adding: "there were a lot of things that needed a fresh start. We decided we might as well do it ourselves."

Not an operating system

Google also strenuously denied that, with features such as a built-in task manager to close down errant web apps, it had essentially created a pseudo operating system instead of a browser.

"There's no way you can claim the browser is an OS," replied Tholome.

Yet, he didn't deny that the end goal of Chrome is to migrate people away from desktop programs to web apps such as its own Google Docs. "As more people do more stuff in the cloud, the browser becomes more important," he added.

"We will make apps work better but this is not an operating system, it's a browser. They do help each other but they're not related."

Microsoft, we suspect, may disagree.