Google has subtly announced its incoming Google Chrome browser, which is based on the existing rendering engine Webkit and will include Google’s Gears project, through a comic book drawn up by Scott McCloud, creator of the classic Understanding Comics. It will be open source, and written from scratch, and will feature many improvements such as multithreading, enabling separate threads to render separate tabs, preventing an overall browser lock-up due to a faulty page or, more frequently, a JavaScript glitch.

It will feature a new JavaScript Virtual Machine, too. It's quite obvious that basically all virtual machines used by today's browsers, well, suck. They hang up frequently, slow down even the fastest computers for some crappy, basic operations, and they suck up gigabytes of memory for no apparent memory. Google's solution is the brand new V8 virtual machine, built from scratch by a team in Denmark, which promises to fix all these problems.

Also, the tab system will be completely revamped. The tabs will be displayed on the upper side of the window, not below the address bar, as in today's browsers. There's also a privacy mode which can be enabled for a single tab (porn tab).

Furthermore, Google promises that each tab is sandboxed so that it won’t go on and affect your entire operating system. This means everything can be safely and separately closed should problems occur.

What remains to be seen now is whether Google can deliver on these promises and really put out a cool browser. Building an Internet browser is a big deal, especially if you do it from scratch. It is by no means something which can be achieved overnight, even if you are Google. So, for now I'll remain skeptical until a real working version is released.