Microsoft and Google Give The Browser a Rewrite

This absence of clutter could make Chrome the perfect starter browser -- if only it came pre-installed on a new computer.

Chrome matches Safari's private browsing and IE 8's InPrivate option with a similar mode, "incognito." But it leaves out such common features as support for the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) updates offered by many sites and the add-ons and extensions you can use to customize IE and Firefox.

Chrome also showed its beta status in such glitches as text that briefly vanished as I typed it into an online form and Flash videos that randomly stopped playing after a couple of seconds.

But the biggest issue with this browser is the brand name. Google does some great work, but do you want it providing all of your Internet experiences? Would you eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same restaurant?

In that light, the best feature of Chrome may not be its simplicity but its open-source code, free for anybody to inspect and, if they wish, improve. (Credit where it's due: A chunk of this code comes from the WebKit open-source core of Apple's Safari, which itself dates to an earlier project, KHTML.)

Both IE 8 and Chrome attempt to cure a common ailment of Web browsing by running separate pages in separate blocks of code so that when one page crashes, you can keep viewing any other pages you have up. That technique eats a fair amount of memory, but as memory gets cheaper, this tradeoff may not seem so bad.

I wouldn't dump Firefox for either of these just yet, but I'm certainly looking forward to seeing what the Firefox (and Safari and Opera) developers do to top these releases. The browser market can only get more interesting from here on out.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com. Read more athttp://blog.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward.