Google’s Chrome browser is pretty sweet. Some of the reasons are simple, some are esoteric; many, people won’t understand.

But the most telling aspect of the release may be the screenshot I’ve attached here. Have a look at the Chrome task manager and the Windows task manager. Which knows more about what I’m doing? Which is on top? Windows is Chrome’s bitch.

Chrome addresses some important things Google needed to do. It had to allow smart edge-side caching, after the pre-fetching of Google Web Accelerator failed. It needed offline capabilities, but Gears wasn’t getting the mainstream downloads needed to gain traction. And it needed stability, otherwise some addictive Tower Defense game could trash your thesis when you wrote it in Google Apps.

Chrome tackles these problems, and others, elegantly. In doing so, it marginalizes the desktop. The battle now will be between the cloud platforms — like Google — that need only a thin slice of rendering at the edge; and the remote desktops of the world (I’m looking at you, Citrix and Microsoft) that carriers may provide in a PC-as-a-Service model.

In some ways, companies like AT&T and Akamai — who have tons of hardware at the edge — just got pwned too, because Google gets new edge hardware every time someone installs Chrome. Sure, Google’s adoption of AJAX for pretty much everything already gave them computing power at the edge, so capacity scaled as more and more people used an application. But with Chrome, that edge computing is reliable. The difference is that AT&T and Akamai pay for all the servers they deploy around the world, but we pay for the edge computing Google uses — it’s our desktop.