The rumours have been going around the web for years about the possibility of the Google browser, with some rather wild speculation about what exactly it would be like. John Rhodes seems to be one of the earliest to float the idea of the Google Client in September 2001, and in August 2004, based on Google’s relationship with Mozilla at the time, Kottke predicted a Mozilla-based Google browser.
In February this year, it was reported that Google had assembled a team to work on on a WebKit based browser, then known as GBrowser. Now just over 7 months later, all the rumours and predictions have finally been realised. Google Blogoscoped announced and leaked a comic book entitled Google Chrome earlier today describing many of the innovative features developed for the new browser. Shortly afterwards, the official Google blog admitted that it was mistakenly released a day early.
It should be noted that the concept also includes a few ideas based on features in other browsers, such as Opera’s Speed Dial, and both Firefox and Opera’s address bar (a.k.a. Awesome bar), called omnibox.
The comic was drawn and created by Scott McCloud and has been released under a Creative Commons by-nc-nd 2.5 licence. The comic has currently been taken down due to server load (it’s up again), but I have published a copy of the whole comic here for you to see it, if you haven’t already. You can also download a tarball of all the images.