According to an article by Philipp Lenssen, Google has announced the release of an open source web browser project that should greatly benefit the way we surf the web. The announcement came complete with a comic illustrated by Scott McCloud himself, which tells the origin story of why Google's jumping into the ring with Firefox and Microsoft to start what might be the next browser war.

In short, the Google Gears team, the people responsible for helping web applications work flawlessly when a browser loses connection with the Internet, were brainstorming on some workarounds for the way browsers act now, especially with regards to how they handle memory, and this led to the realization that browsers hadn't been re-written fresh for years and years.

A lot of the details pertain to how memory and processes are allocated. A lot of the design notes explain that several aspects of the browser will be tab specific. This means that if you load a web application in one tab and it starts choking on a bad javascript process, the rest of the browser should function well. There are security treatments that act this way, too, processing within a single tab but not spreading to the browser as a whole, in an effort to reduce phishing attempts, etc.

There's no estimated release date, but as someone who nearly lives in his browser, I'll be watching for it, and will report on its release. Oh, and please note, this is Windows only for now, leaving us poor Mac guys on the sidelines. Read the full article here.