I’ve got to admit, I think Google have just raised the bar for product launches. Their new web browser, Google Chrome, isn’t just interesting because it’s yet another new entrant; it didn’t seem long ago the world was destined to have one browser, but now Chrome enters a crowded marketplace, alongside Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and many more. Google think they can do better than what’s out there right now, especially with the growth of web applications and the demands they have on the standard browser environment.

Chrome isn’t out yet – and when it is it will be on Windows only, but given its open source nature and Google being behind it it won’t be very long before you’ll see this on a variety of platforms including mobile, no doubt. But there’s a lot of chat on the blogs about it, and it isn’t just because of who’s behind it and what they’re doing – it’s because of how they announced it. Rather than just produce a standard page about the browser, they got some of the people behind it to talk about it to comic book artist Scott McCloud, who produced the introduction in comic book form:

While the details of the comic are quite technical, the style is light and breezy and (as you can see) not short of jokes either. I especially like the idea of using the people who made it feature as characters within it, demonstrating the features – getting real people to the forefront. Whether Google Chrome is destined to dominate the browser market or be just a curious side project, it’s impressed really well with a launch as clever and attractive as I can remember. Anyone else seen a tech product launch as fresh as this?