Wow. Over the past 3 years I loved watching anxiously as Google made multiple strategic acquisitions (like Writely, Jot, and Tonic Systems), and was impressed with each, but not as impressed as when they tied them together into Google Docs and Google Sites. And it hasn’t stopped there…Google Gadgets that can be embedded and customized into your Google Spreadsheets give data visualization unlike anything else.

But one major weak point for Google has been out of Google’s hands, and that is the web browser. With each new launch of a Google product, there is an increasing dependency on the web browser’s JavaScript interpreter and runtime. Today’s browsers use a JavaScript engine that simply is not capable of compiling, debugging and running JavaScript code quickly. Whats more is that browsers today only allow one JavaScript “process” to run at a time. While this may be a bit on the technical side, it basically means that browsers are simply unable to run today’s web applications like Google Docs and Google Sites efficiently.

Announcing Google Chrome. A web browser built by Google, designed specifically for web applications. Targeting especially the JavaScript engine that is their achilles heel today, Google Chrome is very fast, able to run multiple requests/processes at once, and best of all, open source.

Only a few screenshots exist right now, including the following, courtesy of CNET.

Google Chrome - Screenshots

Today (September 2, 2008), at 11am PDT, Google will be holding a press conference to announce Google Chrome officially, and open it for download. I’ll be providing a first review of it as soon as its available here. Stay tuned, and definitely check it out when its available.