After a lot of rumors about google’s intentions of launching a web browser, and a lot of early screenshots of the application emerging in the blogoshere google has made the official announcement on there blog.

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

The company is hosting a press conference at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters Tuesday at 11 a.m. PDT. I will be there and will live blog.

Where can you download Google’s Chrome Browser?

Update: You can download Google Chrome Here.
You cant download it yet, they released a comic book in witch you can see some of the browser features:

• Includes a brand new JavaScript virtual machine called V8
• Tabs wil go above the window, not below the address bar
• Location bar will support auto-complete functions and suggests web pages you’ve previously visited as well as suggested sites you haven’t
• Upon launch, you’ll see an Opera-like speed dial with bookmarks and thumbnails for up to web sites
  There will be a privacy mode that allows you to surf without saving any personal history (Microsoft is building a similar feature into Internet Explorer
• The browser will constantly download up to date information about web sites with malicious code

Chrome will also utilize Google Gears to allow you to save many web sites and applications for offline use. And web applications will be isolated from other browser tabs, so if Google Docs or another app crashes, your browser won’t automatically close.

Google’s first screenshot of Chrome.

I don’t know if the title is 100% correct, but the fact remains that Opera has just released its 9.5 final version. I haven’t gotten a chance to test it all out, but i noticed a whole new look to Opera. Better or not we will see.

The competition is a little behind, FireFox had yesterday it’s Download Day in the attempt to set a new Guinness World Record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours with the new Release Candidate. This release according to many has been forced by the issues of the previous release in MacOS. They are preparing to go final with FireFox 3, but they are not there yet.

As for Internet Explorer, it’s preparing for its version 8 Beta 2.

Apple has started seeding developers with an early version of Safari 4 (5526.11.2). The release comes amidst news of Apple’s plans for Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) which will focus on performance and quality.

But to be honest i still have Firefox as my default browser, simply because i got used to it … and i like the useful extensions that have been developed for it, like firebug and Yslow.

Mozilla team has set up a pledge program to remind Firefox users to download the Firefox 3 browser within 24 hours of its release in order to nab a Guinness World Record.

Well, that day has come – Firefox Download Day 2008 is here June 17th. Today the 1,594,867  from around the world that have plaged to download the new and improved Firefox 3 should get their copy. It’s not too late to take the pledge and help Mozilla spread browser goodness throughout the planet.

As far as i read Mozilla Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3 will not bring anything new to Windows and Linux users from the RC2 version. The extra release candidate addresses some lingering issues on the Mac OS X operating system. The changes are internal.

Planning is already in progress for Firefox 3.1, which is codenamed Shiretoko. Although still in the early stages of planning, the schedule indicates that alpha releases could be available as early as July. Prominent user interface features planned for the 3.1 release include tab previews and tag auto-completion. Developers also plan to add several new features to Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine such as the HTML 5 video element and CSS text shadows.

Download Mozilla Firefox RC3 here.