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Speaking to the Financial Times, Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt reiterated the party line that Chrome had been developed to provide a better platform for modern online apps, before conceding "there is a defensive component" to the decision.

"Microsoft has a history of favouring its own applications and I can give you 500,000 pages of court testimony, document web blogs and so forth and so on about that," he tells the newspaper.

Asked about the company's repeated denial that it was working on a browser, he acknowledged there had been a shift in attitude.

"It is true that we actually, and I in particular, have said for a long time that we should not do a browser because it wasn't necessary," he says.

"The thing that changed in the past couple of years ... is that people started building powerful applications on top of browsers and the browsers that were out there, in particular in Explorer, were not up to the task of running complex applications."

Read our review of Chrome here.