It’s been a week since Google released “Chrome,” its own web browser, which uses the same rendering engine as Safari. It has had a very receptive welcome with several million downloads, Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt told Reuters on Friday.

"We did not build it with a market share goal. We built it to try to move the industry forward with some new concepts around browsers and security and powerful platforms," Schmidt said. "So we hope that it will influence the design of other browsers to make them more modern."

Apparently Chrome has been designed to download software and Web pages faster than existing browsers and even lets users keep working when one of its windows crashes.

The browser was written with WebKit, the open-source engine behind Apple's Safari and Google's Android.

The first ever concrete evidence of Google’s Chrome was a 38-page comic book sent out by Google to announce the Google Chrome project. The illustrations were created by cartoonist Scott McCloud. This is a challenge to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Google has been working on the product for about two years, but work became more serious when Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 7.

The Chrome browser has a fast JavaScript engine from “the V8 team” in Denmark. Each browser tab runs as its own process and is sandboxed for stability and security reasons. It has a default home page that’s automatically constructed by the browser based on the sites you visit and search frequently, presenting your favorite sites in a grid. The product will be open-sourced, meaning others can modify the code.