The release of the ‘Chrome’ browser by Google has dominated the technology coverage in the way that the US party conventions have dominated political coverage, and it has been subject to detailed analysis based on few facts and a lot of speculation. 

It is clearly a sensible thing for Google to offer people a web browser that is under its control and which can therefore reliably display Google’s website and run the whole range of Google applications, and there may be no more to the project than this.  While one effect of this may be that it makes it easier for people to start relying on Google-branded services instead of buying Microsoft-licensed software, it is foolish to position Chrome solely as an overt attack on Microsoft or as an IE-killer.

So far Chrome only runs on Windows, and it’s an early beta release so doesn’t support many of the features we expect from a browser, like the ability to change its behaviour with plugins. But it’s fast and easy to use, especially for the AJAX-using sites that typify Web 2.0. 

It supports tabbed browsing, opening multiple sites in separate tabs in the same window, just like Firefox, Opera and IE, but the way the tabs work is fundamentally different.   Existing browsers are a single process on your computer, and if something goes wrong with a website then the whole browser has to be restarted.

For people like me who may have ten or twelve tabs open at a time in three or four separate windows on their computer, this is a real pain. Chrome runs each tab as a separate process, so that if something goes wrong only that tab is affected and the browser can continue running. It’s a good idea, and since the Chrome source is freely available, one that other browsers are bound to pick up on as soon as they can.

Why does this matter to those of us who care about energy efficiency?  It isn’t just that we’ll waste less time restarting our browsers and using lots of electricity while we do so. Chrome has been designed to support multimedia sites, sites with rich graphical interfaces and Web 2.0 features, and sites that offer services rather than just content. It is the first browser designed for those who use online services from the cloud rather than local software, and as the ideas that it embodies spread to other browsers it will accelerate the uptake of web services and the move from the desktop to remote applications and data.

As things stand that is a bad thing for energy consumption, because there are hundreds of millions of energy-hungry desktop computers with old CRT monitors out there that are going to be turned into browser-based smart terminals, and the extra energy needed to sustain the network and deliver the server farms will simply add to our electricity consumption, however green the network and the data centres become.

But the new generation of low-power devices, desktop systems that can go to sleep and be awakened by data coming in on the network, and low energy monitors will be designed to work on the cloud, and we should then see an improvement.

Of course the growing number of computers in general, and the growing number of internet users around the world, mean that the total energy consumption of our information and communication technologies will increase, and the carbon load is unlikely to drop in absolute terms even as energy efficiency improves.

So we need to make sure that we use the power of these billions of computers to solve some of the bigger problems, so that we can afford to keep them running for those of us who like watching YouTube, Twittering all day or simply reading sites like wattwatt.

Download Chrome: http://gears.google.com/chrome/ [Windows only]