Like a lot of other people, I've been wondering why Google created Chrome, its new browser released earlier this month.
Tech blogger Robert X. Cringely offers the most plausible explanation so far in his blog, I, Cringely.
The short version speculates that the folks at Google - whose lifeblood is online advertising - came to the chilling realization that Microsoft could cripple them, maybe even wipe them out, by simply turning off advertising in the Internet Explorer browser.
Statistics from w3schools.com show that as of last month, Microsoft's Internet Explorer - versions 5, 6, and 7 - had about half of the marketplace:
| IE7 | IE6 | IE5 | Firefox | Mozilla Suite | Safari | Opera |
| 26.0% | 24.5% | 0.1% | 43.7% | 0.5% | 2.6% | 2.1% |
Internet Explorer 8 has been released in Beta version since those stats were compiled, but its market share is probably still negligible since only geeks (myself included) get involved with Beta versions of new software.
(I'm regretting it already because IE8 is proving to be horribly buggy. I'm bouncing back and forth between it and Chrome. Chrome is simpler and marginally faster and has yet to crash on me, but it doesn't have plug-ins and I really like having my bookmarks on Delicious.)
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