MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google, owner of the most popular Internet search engine, introduced a free Web browser Tuesday to challenge Microsoft’s decade- long market dominance.
The program, called Chrome, shows a series of links to a user’s most visited Web pages on its opening screen. Its address bar predicts destinations based on past activity, so the browser would learn to suggest searches on ‘s site after detecting that a user often goes there to look for books.
The software opens a new front in Google’s fight with Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer controls more than 70 percent of the browser market. Google is trying to parlay its success over Microsoft in online searches into an effort to court users who want e-mail, calendars and word processing through a browser instead of products such as Microsoft’s Word and Excel.
“They’re looking at the big picture of their business,” said David Smith, a Gartner Inc. analyst in Bedford, N.H. “They’re looking at the speed at which browser development is going, and they’re trying to accelerate it.”
A review Tuesday from The Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg called Chrome a “smart, innovative” product that is rough in spots because Google left out some features that are common in other browsers and will be added later.
Chrome may get as much as 20 percent of the market in two years, with some of the biggest gains in countries such as China and Korea where Google’s search engine isn’t as dominant, Lehman Brothers analyst Doug Anmuth in New York said in a research note.
Microsoft, the world’s biggest software maker, released a new version of Explorer last week for testing. The software lets users control whether it saves the sites they’ve visited and can keep Internet sites from tracking user activity.
“The browser landscape is highly competitive,” said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer. “People will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online.”
