Cheekily, Google introduced their new web browser today, aptly named “Chrome” for the sheer lack thereof. Google instead maximizes browser real estate by default, and features the web application first and foremost with a minimalistic set of tabs at the very top of the screen and an “omnibox” serving double duty as an address bar and search window. Nice human factors engineering.

To wax on about the clean user interface would unfairly downplay some more crucial and exciting features under the hood: tabs are actually separate processes with sandboxed priveleges. Finally you can have multiple web applications running concurrently without mucking up each others memory space and fighting for the attention of the browser process. Gone are the days of a single piece of Javascript hanging all 20 tabs you have open and potentially causing you to lose your work. Cross-site scripting just got a whole lot harder.

Google’s gears comes built in, a technology similar to an amazing innovation by Lotus almost a decade ago which in a flash of typical IBM marketing brilliance was called “Domino Offline Services” or DOLS. Gears allows you to copy your web application data locally and even run with the parts of the application that do not depend on connections to other users. Take the web with you on the plane or into your chicken wire shielded bunker. In combination with a feature that allows you to run a web application like a regular windows program in a dedicated window with start menu and quick launch shortcuts, it allows you to replace most of Microsoft Office with Google Docs. Chrome might not be the new web operating system many have been touting, but its a step in this direction.

I haven’t even mentioned one of the coolest aspects: their V8 engine does runtime compilation of javascript and actually infers what are reusable objects, for a potentially huge performance boost (looking forward to some benchmarks!). And topping it off, the browser is open source, and even Microsoft can go grab V8 and implement it in IE.

All in all, the most exciting development on the web this year. In one day of testing it is extremely fast, stable, and fun to use. Looks like a home run for Google in the making, especially if Android gets executed equally brilliantly. More on this later…

In a final coup-de-grace for the first beta, Google did not forget the needs of trekkie monster. ‘Nuff said.