Microsoft’s Internet Explorer reigns supreme with about 80% of the overall share, ten years back Netscape dominated the field. In second is Mozilla’s Firefox which has been steadily narrowing the gap with close to 20% of the browser market now.

And now comes the release of Google’s much-anticipated Chrome browser, add in Opera and Safari, there is plenty of competition.

A simple and fast browser, the recently-launched Chrome lives up to the billing. I haven’t used it that much – I’ve been a Firefox guy for a few years now – but pages according to my unscientific study do render a bit quicker than Firefox or the bloated Internet Explorer.

It’s also very clean, very sleek and has a less weighty feel in use.

Tabs can be created with a single click or via a drag among other. New, blank tabs bring up snapshots of most visited sites and recent bookmarks to get you started faster. Unlike Firefox the other tbas remain alive, pretty much unlike Firfox – a very nice feature!

The browser’s address bar serves as a direct URL entry and a Google search box, all in one (Firefox also has this).

There’s also an “incognito” browser feature, which when activated allows you to surf the web without those page data, cookies, etc., stored in your history or anywhere on your hard drive.

And of course because it is Google, everything from your bookmarks to browsing history is quickly and easily searchable.

So where is Google going with Chrome? To the top, at least that’s where they are hoping to go. While I won’t be switching to Chrome anytime soon (at least not until some great apps warrant such a move), what it looks like to me is that Google is slowly creating its own web-based operating system, and Chrome is a major piece of that puzzle.

Google already has Gmail as an answer to locally based email clients. Google Docs may indeed one day take the place of Microsoft Office  and there’s also Google Calendar, Google Messaging and a host of other apps to fill in the holes. I’d imagine in the Google master plan, in the near future we’ll just flip on the PC, Chrome will automatically load up and we’ll access all our applications from that browser.  Think Microsoft is worried?