Google has released a browser, and the obvious question is why a company that sells advertising against search results would spend years building one and give it away.
The answer is that its entire business sits on top of software it did not control. Every search, every click, every advertisement is delivered through a program made by somebody else, and for most of this decade the dominant one was slow, stagnant, and standards-hostile. A company whose revenue depends on people using the web has an enormous interest in the web being fast, and no ability to make that happen from the outside.
So this is not a product intended to make money. It is a lever, and the thing being levered is everybody else’s release schedule.
The engineering is more interesting than the strategy. Each tab runs as a separate operating system process, which sounds like an implementation detail and changes the character of the thing entirely. A page that crashes takes down one tab. A page consuming memory badly cannot starve the others. Close the tab and the operating system reclaims everything, with no reliance on the browser having tidied up correctly.
Anyone who has lost a morning’s open tabs to a single misbehaving page understands why that matters. It costs memory, and it is worth it.
The JavaScript engine is the other half. Compiling to machine code rather than interpreting produces a difference large enough to change what people attempt to build, and the competitors have already started publishing their own numbers, which is the reaction you want.
Last August I wrote about the five years when the dominant browser received no development at all, and how a fifteen percent challenger was worth more for the spending it forced than for the share it took. This is that argument continuing with a much better funded challenger.
What I would keep an eye on is where this ends. Google now influences the search box, the advertising, the analytics on most sites, and the program used to view them. Each of those was a reasonable move. The accumulation is a single company with a view of nearly every part of the transaction, and no rule was broken to arrive there.