Googleis CEO, Eric Schmidt, explained that Chrome was designed to stop Microsoft from Balkanizing the Internet in ways that favor its own services, according to the Financial Times.

In an interview with the FT, Eric Schmidt said that for a long time, Google believed that it didnit need to build a Web browser. However, the company changed is mind awhile back in face of new competition from Microsoft.

"Microsoft has a history of favouring its own applications and I can give you 500,000 pages of court testimony, document web blogs and so forth and so on about that," Mr. Schmidt said. "We think that the browser continues to be an important platform; that the browser wars of 10 years ago were right: the browser matters."

Chrome was rumored to have been under development for two years. What changed Googleis mind was a change in the technologies and capabilities of modern browsers with, for example, Javascript.

"The thing that changed in the past couple of years ... is that people started building powerful applications on top of browsers and the browsers that were out there, in particular in Explorer, were not up to the task of running complex applications."

Mr. Schmidt sees Chrome as a starting, open source framework for "powerful industrial apps."

Earlier, Googleis co-founder Sergey Brin commented that the current lack of a Macintosh version was "embarrassing." He hopes that itill only be a matter of months until version is released.

Even with that encouraging prospect, itis likely the warefare side of Chrome will be carried out on the PC side, not on the Mac.