Chrome – Does William Gibson Get A Percentage? Um, Oh Yeah, It’s Free

Chrome, which it launched with a cheeky comic book instead of a press release, is the result. It is based on tabs, each of which runs independently of the others for security, speed and stability. It even works offline. It is, in short, the scenario that Microsoft has dreaded ever since Netscape. As Arnaud Weber, a Google engineer and one of the characters in the comic book, says in a speech bubble: “We’re applying the same kind of process isolation you find in modern operating systems.” It is a geek’s way of saying that developers and consumers may soon stop caring about the operating system on their own hard drive altogether.

So says the Economist in its latest edition, discussing the importance of Google’s release of Chrome. Could this be the ultimate blow to the Wintel dynasty which has dominated for so long?

Or the beginning of a new dynasty?