UPDATE: You can download the beta project from the Google Chrome website.

Instead of me talking you through the project, Google and Scott McCloud have put together a cool little cartoon.

However, as a brief summary:

• Google Chrome is Google’s open source browser project.
• The browser will use the popular Webkit HTML rendering engine used in Safari and Adobe AIR.
• The browser will include a brand new JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8.
• The browser will include Gears to allow developers to enhance the user experience.
• Google Chrome will use special tabs, like more traditional browsers, but set above the address and menu bar.
• Each browser tab will run on its own process. If one tab fails for some reason, the whole browser will not need to be restarted, losing valuable work or tabs. This is similar to functionality found in Internet Explorer 8.
• The browser has an address bar which includes a more intuitive auto-completion feature called ‘omnibox’. It is said to be less ‘irritating’ than current auto-complete/suggest functionality common to Firefox 3 or Google Suggest.
• As a default homepage Chrome presents you with a kind of speed dial feature, similar to the one found in Opera.
• Chrome has a privacy mode, which allows you to create an incognito window and nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged on your computer. Again, this is similar to functionality found in Internet Explorer 8.
• Web apps can be launched in their own browser window without address bar and toolbar, much like Mozilla’s Prism project.
• To fight malware and phishing attempts, Chrome constantly downloads lists of harmful sites.

(Click on the images to see a larger view)

You can find out more information from Google’s blog post on the subject.

It is clear that RIAs offer the potential to fundamentally change the user experience and in doing so, yield significant business benefits. However, in order for RIAs to be widely employed, and for more companies to receive these kinds of returns, technologies to build RIAs will need to appeal to a wider range of developers. The ability to cost effectively create rich, engaging user experiences that support corporate objectives and reach a broader developer audience without sacrificing development productivity require a new generation of RIA tools. These tools are being developed by a large number of organisations with Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Sun leading the way with the AIR/Flash/Flex combination, Silverlight, Gears, Quicktime and JavaFX respectively.

The new generation of RIA tools being developed by the likes of Adobe and Microsoft must do the following to allow developers to truely harness the power of RIAs in the commercial environment:

1. Allow developers to write applications using familiar development models to utilise and extend their current skills without requiring them to adopt entirely new or different skills
2. Use standard and standards-based technologies
3. Use industry specific programming models and patterns
4. Use and/or leverage the existing IT infrastructure through wrap and reuse rather than rip and replace
5. Provide pervasive, familiar programming models and an expressive user interface across platforms and devices; and
6. Allow developers to create a solution that delivers scalable, secure, high performance solutions that are bandwidth efficient

These new RIA tools will need to provide the features that enhance IT developer’s abilities to be more creative and to accomplish RIA development with the same or less effort than the tools they use to create other types of applications. What is required are the tools that can help developers achieve these objectives without relying on only HTML or other scripting languages, or having to learn a completely new development approach.

Two vendors which have the technology and capaibility to fully deliver Rich Internet Applications are Adobe and Microsoft. With Microsoft’s Silverlight and XAML, developing rich internet applications to run on Windows platforms will progress at a fast rate. In turn, Adobe has had a head start with the aquisition of Macromedia and the subsequent addition of Flash and Flex to its product offering. Flash and its relative ubiquity across platforms and devices ensures that RIA development and production will be accessible to a large user base and as such puts Adobe at a distinct advantage over Microsoft.

We are in a period of expanding opportunity for Internet and intranet applications. The growth in adoption and usage of the Internet has acted as a driver behind technology spending, spawned such terms as Service Orientated Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Web Services, and enterprise integration trends that seek to combine back-office infrastructures with new front-office applications and the Internet.

Integral to this is the need to communicate better with employees, customers, suppliers, and partners. Intranet applications, including enterprise information portals and employee facing applications, are increasingly depended upon to share information across a company, while outwardly focused extranet applications seek to more tightly bind networks of partners, suppliers and customers and make communication, business transactions and support easier.

A key reason Web applications cannot represent these types of complexity is because of the limitations of HTML pages. The Internet grew up on the notion of a network of loosely coupled, unintelligent clients that communicate with increasingly intelligent servers by sending requests for pages. The emergence of Rich Internet Applications (RIA‘s) has served to blur the distinction between the desktop and the Web and has resulted in smart, powerful and dynamic user interfaces. RIA‘s seek to combine the best of the desktop, Web and communication technologies.

As one would expect, the driving forces behind Rich Internet Applications are the big guns in the technology and Web industry; namely Adobe, Google and Microsoft. Each company has produced their own RIA platforms:

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)

AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA‘s.

Applications can be built using the following technologies:

• Flash / Flex / ActionScript
• HTML / JavaScript / CSS / AJAX
• Combination of these technologies
• PDF can be leveraged with any application

Adobe Integrated Runtime can be found at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

Google Gears

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.

Google Gears consists of three modules that address the core challenges in making web applications work offline.

• LocalServer Cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) locally
• Database Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• WorkerPool Make your web applications more responsive by performing resource-intensive operations asynchronously

Google Gears can be found at http://gears.google.com

Micrsoft Silverlight

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

Microsoft Silverlight can be found at http://silverlight.net