Google has officially announced it will be releasing its own browser, named Chrome. The web comic explaining their thinking is well worth a look, but the key points are:

Each browser tab is a separate process. This means that one web page hanging or script stalling only affects that page. Your browser doesn’t crash or hang — individual tabs crash or hang and can be killed. It’s so obvious it’s brilliant. I imagine Firefox, Camino, and Safari will all follow suit as soon as they can.

Google has been working on a new JavaScript engine, named V8, that’s roughly twice as fast as the latest versions of Firefox or Safari nightly build. Remember that these engines were in turn a lot faster than Internet Explorer or anything else we had a year ago. We’re looking at something like a 10x improvement in overall JavaScript performance over the last two years.

It’s based on Webkit.

It’s entirely open source.