Google's motto is "don't be evil". It's a mantra that's served them quite well over the last ten years, as they've moved at a meteoric rate from being mere upstarts in the search engine business (then dominated by the likes of Yahoo, Lycos, and Altavista) into the nearest thing the internet has to a God. Of course, the bigger they get, the harder it is for them to not be seen as evil by default. Power corrupts, after all - and the idea of a single company controlling, however benevolently, so much of what we do online seems inherently... creepy. They already direct most people to most parts of the internet, they've taken on email, advertising, mapping, and later this year they'll start to infiltrate mobile phones with their Android operating system (a competitor to the likes of Symbian, Windows Mobile, and of course the Iphone). These days, every new inch of Google growth tends to set a few more alarm bells ringing. Imagine if Google bought Facebook - the sales of tin foil hats would double overnight.

A few such hats will have been donned yesterday, with the news that Google is now hoping to put a browser on everyone's desk as well. The giant cleverly couched this news in a cuddly and accessable comic book that makes very good reading, but many will still question the motives of Google in becoming a gatekeeper in such a direct way. Traditionally, Microsoft are berated for forcing Internet Explorer on every Windows customer, but Google's free download combined with the extent to which they dominate the rest of the web could arguably give them far greater power and influence.

Of course, the problem for Google in a sense is that their products are always so good. That's how we got here in the first place. They're the first choice for web search, email, maps, advertising and more, not because those services are forced on anyone, but simply because they tend to be better than the competition - and from the looks of that comic book, and first impressions of the beta, Chrome is going to be no different.

The browser market is a changeable beast - after the original "browser wars" that left Microsoft's Internet Explorer roundly triumphant over Netscape, the independent browsers have since had a resurgence. Opera is still hanging in there and making waves with it's mobile browser, Apple's Safari is making a bid for the PC as well as the Apple market (where it comes bundled with every Mac, Iphone, and Ipod Touch) and of course the rogue offspring of Netscape, Mozilla's Firefox, has been increasing the pressure on IE for some time. The day before yesterday I'd have put money on Firefox to keep increasing its share, if for no other reason than the fact that Mozilla happens to be funded in part by a certain search company by the name of Google. There's bound to be some nervousness at Mozilla now, since their biggest investors appear to have taken their own route - and rather than produce a Google-branded version of Firefox, they've actually done something quite different with Chrome. It's open source, and it uses some open source elements taken from Firefox, but its HTML rendering engine is actually Webkit - the competing open source project that also forms the basis for Apple's Safari - and much of its other technology is quite different too.

Chrome is built quite differently to just about every other browser out there - as that comic book explains. Imagine all the cliches you can apply to innovative new software such as "rewriting the rule-book" and "creating a 21st century browser" and that's what Google have done here. It's built for "web applications" rather than mere web pages, and breaks away from the traditionally linear way in which browsers render web pages (download this image, run that piece of Javascript, display that text) - replacing it with a multitasking model that is able to handle each of those processes separately and simultaneously - so a misbehaving piece of Javascript, or a slowly downloading image, doesn't snarl up the whole page while you wait. Each of these processes is "sandboxed", keeping the browser safe from crashes and you safer from malware, and there's a slew of heavy duty security features designed in from the ground up.

Chrome is available now in beta. Usually with beta software you find things may be working well, but aren't yet optimised for speed - but with Chrome, speed is a core part of the design. On our ageing, decrepit Thinkpad with a Pentium III, 700mhz processor, Chrome flies - far faster than Firefox in both starting up and opening pages. It's also rock solid as far as I can tell. The user interface is subtly different to the competition, but I like the changes - the default home screen which shows you thumbnails of your favourite sites is a nice touch, and - as you might expect - the search functionality is good too. The unusual placement of the tabs (along the top edge of the window rather below the menu) already feels quite natural.

All Chrome lacks right now is an extension system. With Firefox, arguably the most popular extension is Adblock, which blocks the ubiquitous Google Ads as well as everything else - Google aren't likely to want that added to Chrome, but then perhaps that's the real challenge for them - to produce a browsing experience so good, we can live with the ads, and live with Google's vision of the web. It's very nearly there already.