I have often stated that my favorite search engine is Google. In fact, I was one of the first few thousand people to start using it shortly after it went beta out of Stanford in the late ‘90s! Back then it was obvious that it was far better than anything else out there, and the company has continued to excel and impresses me to this day. Most people barely scratch the surface of Google’s features and capabilities, but I’ve found many of them invaluable as I search and dig for information on a daily basis.

Google is now coming out with a brand new browser, Chrome, which is intended to compete with Explorer, Safari and Firefox. Chrome sharpens Google’s already intense competition with Microsoft, the maker of Internet Explorer. Google hopes that Chrome will loosen Microsoft’s grip on the browser market.

But Google also said Chrome was created in large part to allow users to interact with increasingly powerful programs that run in a browser window, like Gmail, Google Docs and applications created by other companies. The company claims Chrome is the first browser built from scratch with such applications in mind.

Lars Bak, the Google engineer who was the technical leader for Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine, said he's confident that Chrome is "many times faster" than the rivals at running JavaScript, the programming language that powers many Web applications. Google offers a site with five JavaScript benchmarks; on each one of these tests, Chrome trounced the competition.