I’ve been playing with Google’s shiny new browser, named Chrome, for a week or more. Initial impressions are excellent, despite the obvious fact that we’ve only got a small part of its capability at this stage.

Chrome has the same elegant, simple design that Google is famous for, and it’s much faster than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and even Firefox. Indeed, it renders Syntagma sites better than Firefox does — one of the reasons I stopped using it a year ago. By contrast, Chrome delivers a seamlessly fluid performance over a range of functions.

Syntagma in Google’s Chrome browser

Like most Google products its browser comes with a broader philosophy, or masterplan, than the functionality suggests. While any browser will render internet objects for viewing and manipulation, Chrome is much more ambitious.

Ultimately it’s intended to replace many features of the operating systems on computers with what has become known as “cloud” computing — using applications and services already web-side, not embedded on a local hard drive.

Google says, “We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.”

Significantly, Microsoft has huge vested interests in boxed software and desktop products in general, from which the bulk of its income derives. It’s finding it all but impossible to substitute browser versions of them and still make money. A clash with the new Google worldview — which aims to strip the Microsofties of their dominance — is about to break out in earnest.

Google believes Microsoft may fire its first broadband broadside by switching off adverts in IE8 sometime soon. Internet Explorer Version 8 is still in Alpha mode and is, reportedly, hopelessly mired in problems — shades of Windows Vista — but when it comes it could contain a bombshell for Google.

Since Google is still a monoculture based on search and its accompanying advertising, that would hit them where it hurts most. The share value of the company would drop overnight and the sense of invincibility that Google has enjoyed on Wall Street and everywhere else would be shattered, maybe for good.

Hence the company has got its retaliation in first by bringing out its own browser — which has been hinted at for years. It has also encouraged Mozilla, an open-source firm that produces Firefox (the geeks browser of choice), while promising a new cloud environment based on Chrome and its web-based apps: Google docs, spreadsheets and presentations, directly challenging Microsoft Office. And there are many other new experiences under development in Google’s locker.

A lot of us in web publishing still haven’t forgiven the Californian crew for their treatment of small-to-medium internet publishers last year, many of whom were driven out of business by crashes in PageRank. But Google’s sense of adventure and all-embracing strategic coherence means you can’t hate them for long.

Chrome should be on everyone’s computer, simply because much of what the Googlers are doing will only be viewable in their rapidly developing cloud browser.

Sooner than we think, businesses will be eliminating their expensive data centres and embracing cloud computing. Internet sage Bob Cringely of PBS believes that “relatively few organizations really ought to have their own data centers”.

Chrome is the future. It’s not fully with us yet, but will be in the next decade, which, astonishingly, is only a little more that a year away.